Spier Light Art
01.03 - 01.04.2024
“The night contests the day, then the day contests the night.” – Anne Boyer, “Erotology II: The Long Night”
When I visited the sixth iteration of Spier Light Art, curated by Vaughn Sadie and Jay Pather, I made a point to arrive just before dusk so that I could see the twenty-one artworks scattered across the sprawling wine estate in both the dark and light. Throughout the evening, as the colours shifted from green and yellow to black and blue, as the day crowds traded places with the nocturnal animals, I could not resist the desire to consider the age-old dialectic between that temptress, beauty and its shadow side, violence. My companion thought the take would be too basic – in Stellenbosch, where charm is, at this point, practically synonymous with brutality – but I pressed on: it seemed to me that the artists in this year’s cohort had found ways to make this irresolvable tension productive, to use this mutual contestation as an animating force.
Abri de Swardt, Flood Light, Spier Light Art, 2024
The standout of the show is most certainly Abri de Swardt’s Flood Light, a replica of a collapsed flood light from the Danie Craven Rugby Fields at Stellenbosch University, sprawled across a rock as if it was carried and laid to rest by a flood. This gargantuan human rubble beside the ambivalently bubbling river, beneath the swirling petticoats of the willow trees, seems to me a fine example of the tension I am trying to name. Imagine, for a moment, the same work in a gallery. It would dwarf the space, impose its presence, intimidate the viewer with its banal terror. Here, casting its anxious white light on the river, it looks like some ailing mechanical animal blinking mournfully at us on the opposite bank. I have the desire to send it back to where it belongs so that it will stop encroaching on this Eden. Perhaps what De Swardt is trying to tell us is that it shouldn’t have belonged anywhere in the first place.
Mthuthuzeli ‘Blaze’ Zimba, Moriti wa Kganya, Spier Light Art, 2024
Mthuthuzeli ‘Blaze’ Zimba’s Moriti wa Kganya provokes a similar feeling. Zimba has plopped a corrugated tin shack atop a swell in the grass, disrupting the bucolic setting. A video projection that was meant to show the artist wheeling the shack from Khayelitsha to Cape Town wasn’t functional on the day I arrived, but the intended effect remained. Graffitied with such tags as umhlaba (land), izwelethu (our land) and moriti (shadow), the work seemed to lambast the nearby picnickers’ pleasantries. A motion-sensing light that shone paranoidly bright at passersby was equally rattling, politicising the fantasy of looking by introducing the dread of being looked at.
The disquiet between onlooker and looked-on was explored further by Kenneth Shandu. Invisible’s white wire sculptures depicted the outlines of figures who could be found tying bundles, pushing trolleys or carrying bags. While Shandu cites homelessness in Durban as his source of inspiration, the context of this particular setting sparked associations with the many hundreds of farmworkers whose seldom acknowledged labours beget the idyll that Spier visitors enjoy. A trenchant reminder perhaps, but if I were to make one criticism, the spotlights angled thereon were not as innovative a use of light as some of the other works. I harboured a similar qualm with Jenna Burchell’s Songsmith (The Great Karoo). As much as I enjoyed pressing my hand to the theremin rock to hear its metallic drone, the spotlights placed thereon were not enough to convince me that the works had fit the brief.
Kenneth Shandu, Invisible, Spier Light Art, 2024
Compare this to artists who have used the symbolism of light to such an effective degree, for example, Qondiswa James and Themba Stewart’s Keep The Lights On: a series of plein-air antechambers, similar in structure but varying in furnishing. One has a pressed ceiling and glass lamp shade; another boasts ornamental ironwork and crystal chandelier; another still is fashioned with chicken wire and a single exposed light bulb. This simple design conveys a clear message about how apartheid spatial planning imposes difference on our most basic understanding of the world, down to the light we use to see. Marco Chiandetti’s Beacon also used a simple design – mercury bulbs and oak saplings enclosed by netted tents – as a metaphor for the violence that shapes the present. The oak trees, introduced to South Africa by European settlers to produce wine barrels, are protected in their little mesh bubble, while the light attracts insects who try and fail to get in. Meanwhile, the lawn surrounding the enclosure continues to be tended by the farm’s gardeners, while inside, the grass is allowed to grow wild. Could these double movements – attraction and deflection, protection and enclosure, control and abandon – be allegories for the exhibition as a whole?
Alan Alborough, ZZZZ, Spier Light Art, 2024
Undoubtedly one of the most interesting aspects of Spier Light Art is the way in which it occasions a public, and how this public contends with the challenges posed by the artists. On the one hand, it warms this cynic’s heart to see people in their hundreds flock to an art festival after dark, to watch kids play soccer in the light of Alan Alborough’s ZZZZ, or many-gendered couples lounging on blankets beside Goldendean and Shruthi Nair’s Vesica Piscis. On the other hand, it can be quite cringe to see Charles Palm’s and Tiago Rodrigues’ solemn reckonings with the farm’s history of slavery eclipsed by visitors who would prefer to use the Slave Bell as a stage for photo opportunities. In my younger years, I would have called this discrepancy tragic. These days, I think the tension might serve a purpose.
Naadira Patel and Sarah de Villiers , Assembling Lines, Spier Light Art, 2024
I’ll use Naadira Patel and Sarah De Villiers’ Assembling Lines as an example. In the work, three monitors unspool programmed text that satirises the hauntingly banal vocabulary of advertisements, trade headlines and stock market updates in a way reminiscent of Jenny Holzer’s LED work. The incongruence between the electronic tickers and the waterfowl dam that serves as their backdrop could not be more precise. And yet, the antithesis between work and site reveals such unexpected connections. The tickers make the lovely night out seem suddenly bureaucratic: are we just numbers here, ticked and tallied up to be presented at the next board meeting so that next year’s Light Art budget can be allocated accordingly? In turn, the tickers acquiesce to the garden and its public, casting a soft red light on selfie-takers’ faces: who could have imagined that the vernacular of work could be so organically reappropriated by leisure?
There’s a fine line between commiseration and communion. Increasingly, I’m fascinated by the paradoxes that arise when art manages to toe that boundary, and I admit I was a bit surprised to discover that this exercise in site and light provides ample opportunity.
