Mapping the fault-lines
by Kim Gurney
The science of mapping has as its subtext a notion of 'the truth' set out in an objective, verifiable fashion. Yet, as Keith Dietrich's exhibition shows, mapping is just another form of perspective. When viewed historically, maps often show more about the cartographer's frame of reference than about the land itself.
This observation is immediately evident in the first part of Dietrich's 'Horizons of Babel' at the University of Stellenbosch Art Gallery. As reference, Dietrich has displayed three different mapping systems used over time to present the world. As Lize van Robbroeck writes in the introduction to 'Horizons', Dietrich in a sense maps the very history of mapping.
The differences in perspective are startling, as are the mistakes copied by one cartographer from another. The myth of Africa in particular, as a mystical, vast empty interior is perpetuated until later explorers start to map it with more accuracy.
One of the exhibition's most striking features is how Dietrich has played upon this tension between fact and fiction. In his work exhibited in the following two rooms, Dietrich uses digital manipulation to nip and tuck his images, giving them an appealing but false continuity.
He says: "I like to work with the play between truth and a lie. What is the truth at the end of the day? We are led to believe that science is a truth and myth is false but science can equally include myth."
Dietrich's 'Horizons of Babel' essentially maps an arc between the most north-westerly and southerly points of the Western Cape: Cape Columbine and Cape Agulhas. The centre point of this arc happens to rest on a farm called Babelonstoring - hence the exhibition's title.
Dietrich divided this arc into several segments and photographed the scene at these points. These photographs were later transcribed into seven aquarelle panorama paintings, exhibited together forming one unified semi-circle. In this way, the points are determined by chance _ an idea that appeals to Dietrich's fascination with chaos and order.
This semi-circle of paintings is exhibited flat to the ground, only inches off the floor, with its diameter determined by the wall. To view them from a central standpoint, one has to step over the actual paintings. This is a conscious play by Dietrich on the position of the viewer with reference to the 'panopticon'. This historical prison design positioned the warder as an all-seeing eye with the prisoners in a circular arrangement around him.
The second element of Dietrich's exhibition is his own maps, derived from a variety of actual maps of Africa and the Western Cape wherein his arc lies. He has manipulated the maps in a variety of ways that includes superimposing images drawn from various sources like First Aid books, cooking guides and medieval icons.
There is no coherent narrative behind Dietrich's choice of images. They are a combination of chance and aesthetics but they all refer to the fetishistic obsession Western science has with classification based on visual evidence. Dietrich says: "I make references to how we visually understand our world and how images have informed our world."
The maps and panorama paintings are also drawn together in a limited edition artist's book. It is beautifully presented in the exhibition as a precious object that both brings the work together and amplifies it with an incisive text written by Van Robbroeck.
The exhibition is a densely layered and deeply referenced product of three years' work. This very intensity is also its Achilles heel. Viewers unfamiliar with Dietrich's motivation could be confounded by its dense references and fail to appreciate its full meaning.
Just as past maps reveal something about their makers, so Dietrich's 'Horizons of Babel' shows a self-reflexive artist conscious of the parameters within which he explores the land.
Dietrich uses the genre of landscape and the scientific recording thereof to expose the false constructs under which successive generations have laboured. One wonders where those fault-lines lie in contemporary society, where accepted fact will one day also be exposed as fiction.
June 8 - 29
