Bruising, beautiful echoes

0 of 3

Dissonance, divergence and even fisticuffs have torn asunder the fine art movement associated with Rhodes University over 40 years.

But these factional differences have been curated into a unique exhibition which puts all this rowdy and contemplative house of creatives together in one, united, even affectionate, conversation.

In a startling moment of closure and new openings, the founder of the university’s fine art collection of artworks created by its own artists and teachers, the former head of department and the fabulously eccentric and direct emeritus Professor Robert “Bobby” Brooks, 83, died on Tuesday — as the exhibition, In Conversation: Four decades of artworks by current and former staff of the Rhodes University Fine Art Department was opened at the start of the 50th National Arts Festival.

Brooks spoke of fisticuffs over creative differences among Eastern Cape artists in the 1960s, but according to friend Hilary Graham: “We would drink Tassenberg and fish through the night and Bobby would recite TS Elliot’s The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock out into the ocean.”

Brooks had pioneered the collection in the 1980s, but in the turbulence of liberation and cancel culture which ensued it had become dispersed.

In a further moment of art and life coalescing, the three Rhodes fine art lecturers who pulled long nights and days to hustle 39 pieces out of various nooks and crannies in the university and around the province, themselves represent three generations in the department.

The Dispatch spoke to all three curators — master’s graduate Robyn Munnick, who has been lecturing for three years, head of department associate professor Maureen de Jager, who has been in the department for 20 years, and professor Dominic Thorburn, who was with the department for 40 years and retired last year at 65, though he is still teaching on a short-term contract.

They spoke of their sadness at Brooks’s death and praised his founding of the collection in the 1980s as a teaching resource as visionary.

The exhibition, celebrating both the National Arts Festival’s 50th and the university’s 120th year, was a “tribute to his significant and lasting legacy. RIP Prof Brooks”.

Munnick, a multimedia painter, said she found Conversations to be a blend of ideas and generations of staff still there and those who had left for other universities and countries.

“As Dom notes in information passed on to me, the Rhodes fine arts department was initially known as a painting school so it was interesting to see how painting has changed over the years.

“You have Robert Brooks and Noel Hodnett very much focused on the Eastern Cape landscape using a very thick, textured approach to applying their paint and impasto technique [using a palette knife]. 

“And then came Tanya Poole, who painted commissioned portraits of chancellor Jakes Gerwel and vice-chancellor Dr David Woods in a very realistic yet unapologetic approach to portrait painting — and quite controversial at the time due to the natural approach to portraying the subjects.

“She did not try to make them look pretty, pleasant or very formal sitting in their gowns and regalia. It was literally focused on their faces and who they are as people.”

Munnick compared the style of Brooks and Hodnett “to mine as a painting lecturer for two years”.

“We all focused on the landscape but have a very different approach to painting.

“I use a lot of thinner layers of paint and a variety of painting media, which breaks away from the traditional bounds of painting by working on wood, which allows me to carve into and build onto the work and make a different form of mark.

“As a painter, it was interesting to pick up the colours as we went through the exhibition selecting the best and most appropriate work, not what would look good together because it is a conversation.

“As we were curating works from the 80s, 90s, 2000s and 2020s, we realised how there were certain common elements picked up from a colour palette or composition, so there are beautiful yellows in main pieces like Sikhumbuzo Makandula’s photographs and Brooks’s painting, touching on Christine Dixie’s prints, works from Nigel Mullins and Dominic Thorburn’s prints 

“It was a highlight to see how fine art photography at Rhodes has evolved over years. Obie Oberholzer taught Brent Meistre, who taught Sikhumbuzo Makandula, and all three of them lectured at Rhodes.

“Obie’s distinct approach to colour led to Brent going monochromatic and getting into moving image through stop-motion animation bordering on an element of performance, and Sikhumbuzo commenting on many sociopolitical issues in his photographs and taking those elements into performance art and video art.

“This was how fine art photography can be, how it evolves.”

Head of department De Jager said: “Sometimes the conversations register as visual riffs, a colour form or theme echoing across the space.

“For example, little yellow accents being picked up works which bounce across space, and works that have similar thematic interests or formal properties — Mark Wilby’s Luggage and my Little Suitcases.

“These echoes set up the conversations between and across the different artworks, between past and present.

“The conversations entail an element of dissonance, understandably as ideas and ideologies shift across time and space.

“Despite this, there is still an overriding sense that what holds all of the artworks together in one conversation is the fact that we are united in our understanding and appreciation of art as a common language.

“We have on one wall a very large landscape by Noel Hodnett, which is virtuoso oil painting on canvas, and directly across the room you have Robyn Munnick’s set of panels, which is also a landscape but resolved very differently with a very different use of the painting medium using mixed media, working dimensionally and experimentally and with layers so in that there is an immediate resonance.”

The two large works face each other across 40 years “and when you look at them closer you can see how the medium of painting has shifted in that time”.

In August, the university's visual representation, arts and culture committee tasked De Jager to head up a task team to do something meaningful with the university’s art collection “scattered in buildings across the length and breadth of campus”.

Typical of contemporary university management-governance style language, the curators were requested to “devise a strategy for the assessment and oversight of the Rhodes University art collection”.

“It was a rather daunting mandate,” she said.

The Brooks-inspired collection had grown steadily to become a sizeable financial, cultural, intellectual and teaching asset revealing “important shifts in representations, themes and concerns in the visual landscape of the university, and beyond.

“In wrestling with our mandate, the team decided on a multipronged approach — including an inventory of the entire collection, as a matter of urgency.”

In many months of labour, likened to a “treasure hunt”, the team “liberated” remarkable artworks from the walls of dimly lit corridors and private offices, “enabling diverse art audiences to appreciate their value”.

They decided to seek out works by permanent staff, invited guest lecturers, such as well known SA artist Diane Victor, who taught a drawing project to students annually over a period of many years, and sabbatical leave replacements.

Facing a wealth of pieces, they decided to exhibit works that would be “representative rather than comprehensive”. 

They found gaps and borrowed additional works from the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, the Ann Bryant Art Gallery (Carl Roberts’s 1999 “Young Hercules” and Diane Victor’s Smoke portrait III, and Smoke drawing on paper, 2006), and private collections.

They also invited the submission of new works by the current staff to bring the conversation to the precipice of the present.

When it was up and done, the team stepped back and looked.

De Jager saw bright transformations in visual culture at the university, an endlessly shifting lens, and a significant collective contribution made by the department to fine art.

At this point, the reveal for De Jager was “a 40-year conversation between fine art colleagues, united in our appreciation of art as our common language”.

Thorburn, speaking shortly before he and filmmaker son Joshua set off on a gruelling adventure motorcycle ride through the deserts of Namibia, said the project had been deeply insightful.

The exhibition, which helped to gather together, audit and preserve the collection, had reflected “different perspectives, styles, aesthetics, demographics. It shows transformation or change in the department, which is quite natural.

“Some alumni tend to be nostalgic, always thinking back, and when they see new exhibitions and are at a loss because they remember it as something else. But all arts schools are in flux, they are ever-changing.”

As a lecturer, who over the time had come to embody institutional memory, he found the project “uplifting and insightful”.

“There were lots of mixed emotions, a poignancy, all sorts of things.

It’s been great too look back and see the journey of our art school, to observe and be reminded of the tectonic shifts, to acknowledge and recognise that it was important.”

• The exhibition runs to June 30, and is open from 9am to 5pm at the Rhodes Art School Gallery. There are guided walkabouts on June 23 from 11am to noon, and June 28 from 4pm to 5pm for a fee of R30. Book a walkabout at https://tickets.nationalartsfestival.co.za/en/events/244/in-conversation-four-decades-of-artworks-by-current-and-former-staff-of-the-rhodes-university-fine-art-department — additional reporting Guy Rogers

DispatchLIVE