Nadja Dhaenke at João Ferreira Gallery
by Lloyd Pollak
Nadja Dhaenke's array of vast bludgeoning canvases and blocky mixed-media assemblages cow through their scale, roughness and intractability. The artist, in her show of new work entitled 'Profit and Loss', has no truck with illusionism. Instead of a window on the world, her creations are lumbering agglomerations of hefty slabs cemented together like bricks in a wall. Entry is denied. The gaze travels over the surfaces, but never into them, for the works are solid flat barriers that repudiate mimesis and insist upon their status as objects.
These daunting creations often look less like paintings than slabby civic monuments of the cenotaph or war memorial type. A rigid grid-like geometricity of structure characterise The Good Citizen and Project, both of which are constructed from chunky blocks. Inscriptions and friezes of men in profile, frontal and three-quarter poses adorn the resultant planes, and recall the rude masses of temple walls covered in friezes and hieroglyphs. Strict hieratic arrangements are also applied to I Could Be and Structure of Behaviour, where the figurative elements are disposed in tiered rows similar to Egyptian and Assyrian bas-reliefs.
Art so relentlessly squared-up and compartmentalised seems redolent of centralised authority. It resonates a moral austerity which the artist accentuates through her palette of militaristic off-colours redolent of camouflage. Tan, khaki, fawn, putty-grey and brown combine with the dull silver of steel and glinting Perspex to create overtones of barracks, factories, plants and offices. Nineteenth and and 20th century industrial archaeology is blended with archaic architecture to achieve a timeless astringency.
By piling blunt rectangle on blunt rectangle à la Rothko or David Smith, Dhaenke erects arrogant phallocratic totems that smack of hubris and downfall. These operate as propaganda broadcasting pharaonic proclamations of might. However, the very vehemence of utterance only serves to betray declining power and confidence. Secondly, they are memorials, albeit memorials which voice relief rather than grief.
Each of the eight artworks seems, in some way, to represent the patriarchal capitalist power structures that still prevail in Western society despite the rise of the counter-culture and alternative ideologies. The imagery conveys a dreary institutional spirit. Dhaenke relies exclusively on pre-existent visual material, and here it carries heavy didactic overtones of the blackboard demonstration, the textbook diagram, the Powerpoint presentation and the inspirational manual on executive success.
The statements stencilled or scrawled onto the canvas - 'The good citizen works hard/obeys the law/is always polite' - ring of authoritarianism, or bark out commands, prohibitions and admonitions. 'You should', 'You ought', 'You must' repeat in a coercive liturgy as behaviour patterns are inculcated into the mind from on high. Highly schematised representations of anonymous male figures depicted in outline as they enact the rituals of introduction and handshake, reveal the dehumanising effect of this programme. The technique of representation by contour involves enclosing the human silhouette in line. Thereby Dhaenke's executives are literally turned into hollow men devoid of all substance and individuality.
A proliferation of grids, charts, tables, diagrams, mathematical formulae and words such as 'status', 'dominance', 'leadership' and 'rank' exemplify the reigning code of dog-eat-dog careerism. Graphs, questionnaires and measuring devices suggest that our response to this covert indoctrination is continually monitored. Behaviour is observed and evaluated, then recorded and filed away by an invisible, omniscient elite which regards blind conformism as the supreme desideratum.
These shadowy authorities usurp the first person and promote compliance by speaking so authoritatively on our behalf as to dissolve our sense of autonomy and identity. Here, Daehnke appears to address the collapse of the notion of the individual and of free will in our late capitalist world where the hidden persuaders of advertising and the media deprive us of agency. We become passive consumers rather than active protagonists and it is not rational choice that determines our appearance, costume, behaviour, opinions and aspirations, but broader social and political forces outside of ourselves.
The very title 'Profit and Loss' smacks of the balance sheet and implies some process of moral and intellectual stocktaking. The hegemony of the capitalist order appears jeopardised. Dhaenke's grandes machines look musty and derelict. Peeling paint, seams, dents, scratches, holes and rust appear everywhere. Areas are scorched and further damage appears to have been inflicted by vandals, riot, fire or flood. Text and image often become difficult to decipher as superimposed layers, reflections, scumbling, chipped paint and dirt interfere with our vision.
However, the principle source of this illegibility is the artist's iconoclastic assault upon her own creations, for she often buries her imagery beneath tempestuous gestural swirls of smouldering browns and blacks. These infuriated swipes seem to express dissociation from what she represents and to record her attempt to obliterate it, and all that it stands for.
The slurries of paint sometimes submerge the imagery, and sometimes merely obscure it beneath pools of thin pigment. Such occlusions introduce a philosophical dimension. The artist seeks to represent our current ideological interregnum where one world-view is gradually replacing another.
Our belief in progress, freedom, individual autonomy, the coherent personality and the ascertainability of truth - all cornerstones of the Enlightenment project - is being eroded by post-modernist theory. This denies every item of the former catechism, and renders the Cartesian frame of reference that formerly underpinned our culture, obsolescent. Cartesianism posits the supposedly neutral viewpoint of the educated, privileged, white, heterosexual male as the sole gauge of truth.
Post-modernism wrests supremacy from this sceptred ogre and accords equal centrality to the perspectives of women, homosexuals, people of colour and all the many other minorities disempowered by the previous philosophic orthodoxies. The now-you-see-it/ now-you-don't effect orchestrated by the colour washes represents an attempt to find some painterly means of conveying the confusion and blur inherent in such a momentous ideological volte-face.
The title painting presents the epitome of the Enlightenment sage surmounted by a bell emblazoned with the word 'Liberty'. This periwigged dix-huitieme savant appears the embodiment of worldly poise as he presides over a notional salon. However the figure, derived from the Hogarth etching of John Wilkes, and executed in a crisply focused, purely linear style, is partially submerged beneath loose sensuous washes of paint. These create a purely abstract effect reminiscent of the colour field paintings of Motherwell, Newman and Rothko.
There is thus a clash of styles. The 18th and the 20th century collide and the Enlightenment belief in reason and logic, implicit in the former's meticulously precise descriptive style, is pitted against the irrational mysticism of the abstract expressionists. Their credo hailed the unconscious as the font of authenticity and truth, and enshrined automatism and accident as the mechanisms that access it.
The sublime irony of the bell of freedom doubling as a hair-dryer and of the salon deteriorating into a mere hairdresser's establishment illustrates how the concept of liberty has degenerated in a media-saturated culture where our will is directed toward narcissistic goals of achieving glamour and fashionability. 'Profit and Loss' yields rich dividends. Dhaenke is both a rigorous thinker and a highly intuitive artist and it is difficult to think of any other South African master capable of phrasing so challenging a statement with such majesty, drama and wit.
Closed: August 27
João Ferreira Gallery
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