Kate Göttgens at Irma Stern Museum
by Lloyd Pollack
'Little Deaths' grew out of Kate Göttgens grieving over the loss of her mother. It was then that the idea of creating ash paintings first came to her. Bereavement provides the thematic kernel of the show which deals with transience, mortality, irretrievable loss and man'�s thwarted aspirations to recover the past and achieve permanence and meaning. Ash connotes death and dissolution, and the material ensures an ideal coincidence between subject and medium.
The introductory work, #21, states Göttgens' themes and typifies her pinboard method of assembling the painting from interlocking rectangular blocks. A flat abstraction is juxtaposed with a misty landscape, a green colour field painting and three almost photographic studies of a young girl's face seen in tightly cropped close-up. The abrupt variations in scale, style, subject matter and viewpoint, fragment the paintings and imply varying levels of reality and modes of vision.
A rough-hewn cube of unmodulated beige floats upon an upright grey rectangle. A section of a cone, executed in the style of a geometric drawing, occupies the beige slab, and this stable primary configuration seemingly evokes a Euclidean world of immutable certainties that contrasts with the slippery and elusive mental flux which prospects the space of maternal consciousness, thought, projection and memory.
An impassioned gestural slash of green separates this image from its neighbour, a sedate colour-field painting vaguely redolent of verdant meadows parted by a river or path. Superimposed upon this is a smaller image of silhouetted mountain ranges. These landscape elements suggest a journey into the interior, an exploration of a psychic hinterland.
Suddenly in the narrow horizontal strip at the painting's summit, #21 opens up into three rectangular peepholes through which we see a watchful girl's peering eyes. Her gaze is one of fascinated scrutiny, and she looks past us and to the side as if surveying the paintings in the adjacent room. Her first two glances are investigative but, in the third frame she bows her head and closes her eyes in wan acknowledgement of the truths revealed.
#18 poignantly depicts five adventurous little boys setting off in a frail inflatable rubber dinghy. In this lyrical evocation of youth the excited lads are painted with overwhelming tenderness, and the reflected light bouncing off the water and bathing their glowing torsos in tinted shadows lends them a radiant presence. The cerulean blue of the vessel, flecked with pearl grey and white highlights, sounds an affirmative note appropriate to this gesture of independence, this voyage of discovery.
The boys' desire to escape parental supervision and venture into the unknown, marks an essential rite of passage, and as such, it entails risk. The dinghy and crew are silhouetted against a black rectangle. Another black rectangle looms up at the painting's summit while a black vertical band runs down the left border. Black is inextricably associated with death and mourning, and the broad, blank, black chunks intimate nullity, absence, abeyance - the void - and set up a groundswell of fear, grief and loss.
The artist has a small boy, and something of her love for him suffuses this painting which expresses a mother's urge to perpetuate that golden moment when her son appears most enchanting and when their bond is at its most intense and binding. Delight in her progeny goes hand in hand with the mournful certainty that time will eventually loosen the very tie the painting celebrates. The pain of future separation casts a pall over 'Little Deaths' and sharpens its edge of anxiety and misgiving.
A cluster of paintings, #16, #17, #19 and #20 present various alternative conclusions to #18, and these conflicting scenarios seemingly embody a mother's fretful imaginings. In #17 craft and crew are buried beneath such dense veils of grey and black pigment that they appear like the dim afterglow of an event long consigned to oblivion. The rosy flesh tones, alive with glowing coloured reflections that make #18 so exuberant and vital have faded away. Pools of dark smouldering browns, mustards and tawny yellows play upon the matrix of black and grey pigment like distant lightning, giving the painting a thunderous bluster and flash.
In #16 the prow of the craft disintegrates into smudges, and the heads of the boys dissolve into hollow outlines or pools of inky blue. Deliquescence often characterises the artist's treatment of the human body which is rendered as a nebulous blur emerging out of the pigment or bleeding back into it. Fudged contours and fluid definition dematerialise the anatomies and lend the boys a ghostly presence identifying them as figments, phantoms or memories shuttling through consciousness rather than sentient beings.
In #20 a scuttled barque hangs over a recuperating boy lying outspread on his stomach. The hints of misadventure are muted as the calm horizontal composition captures a moment of pained reflection and still as the boy mulls over his experience of foundering and rescue. In #19 the signs of life implicit in the boy's open eyes, mouth and tense clasped hand are smothered beneath a shroud of blacks and greys.
The crucifixionary pose of the boy in #9, the flames that recall votive candles, the slabby altar-like cubes, and the bulls all instil a sense of sacrifice and sacrament. The bulls evoke the African tribal rituals of slaughter and feast that solemnise all rites of passage. However the sacrifice #9 mourns is not extinction, but the blight and diminishment of the myriad 'little deaths' whereby the pubescent boy's innocence, enthusiasm and bright hopes are gradually pumiced away by the asperities of growth and experience.
Bulls are emblematic of the dark anarchic instincts of lust and aggression associated with testosterone-raddled male adolescents. The bulls represent the herd instinct and the emergent male drives which impel the youth to distance himself from his mother. The rampant taurine energies of the teenage male are discharged in sexual rivalry and potentially lethal conflicts, and accordingly #9 remains open-ended. The boy may be triumphantly surging up from the deep or about to drown in the ocean of ferocity and libido.
#22, a sextet, evokes the fragile physical charms of a sapling boy and darkly intuits the corruption of his flesh and spirit as he is lain out flat on his back like some sacrifice offered up on the altar of adulthood. In the fifth frame the boy is sanctified as a wounded martyr clutching at the spot where Longinus pierced our Lord with his lance. The Eucharistic overtones of supreme sacrifice are void of any promise of resurrection. Blood expresses grief at this waste and despoilment: plasma floods the final image and pours over the fictive frame into the space of the viewer.
Nostalgia for the irredeemably lost also inflects #6. Outspread fans - Japanese symbols of the floating world of impermanence - metamorphasize into loudspeakers which broadcast some stern instinctual command to the two small boys frozen in stiff and shamefaced poses that reveal how growing self-consciousness erodes their spontaneity.
The scorched mouth of some rude cave, the abode of our distant forbears, emerges from #8�s pale fawn ground. This stony cavern will provide shelter to the naked acolyte seated on the ground. His face and head have been blackened - a frequent practice in African ritual and ceremony. The acolyte's expression is solemn and meditative as he stares ahead and musters the strength he needs to undergo the trials that mark his coming of age and hopefully, vindicate his manhood. A hazy grey valley opens up to left. Like the landscapes of #21, it betokens life's journey, the path of self-discovery and the wild mountain fastnesses to which black tribal initiates are despatched to fend for themselves and commune with their ancestors.
'Little Deaths' culminates in an image of adulthood, a reworking of Edward Muybridge's photographic suite of images portraying the movement of two wrestlers. Their contest of strength embodies some primal conflict between reason and the senses, good and evil, ego and id. Combat is internalised, and each man kills the thing he loves as the sparring partners enact a dance of death, an allegorical paso doble that commences with circling, sizing up and sexual appraisal, then moves into grappling, succeeded by wild flinging actions before concluding in sado-masochistic domination, rape, death and obliteration.
Action is ritualised and frozen into a stylised tableau. Movement is accomplished with a formal balletic grace that purges the image of the sweaty corporeality of Muybridge's brawny lumbering pugilists. The wintry tonal palette of greys and blacks leeches all colour away, distancing the wrestlers from everyday life and elevating them into universal archetypes. Particulars capsize in a foggy blur: the antagonists become disembodied and they glow with a sombre ashen luminescence that proclaims them pure spirit returned to earth to teach a sorry lesson.
Opened: March 7
Closes: April 7
UCT Irma Stern Museum
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