Philosopher Kings

13 June - 13 July 2013

Please join us for the opening on Thursday 13 June at 18:00

Jonah Sack’s second solo exhibition at GALLERY AOP is made up of an integrated, yet varied, series of work. The drawings, structures and slide projections in Philosopher Kings are part of a continuing exploration of the Johannesburg landscape. Jonah grew up in the old mining areas south and west of the city, which he remembers as being “mine-dump yellow, dotted with gum trees and corrugated iron and the rusted remains of industrial structures”. His attraction to these spaces is inflected by both nostalgia and an awareness of its violent history, and the works in this exhibition evoke both the romance and the threat of this place.

Thunderstorms are a series of work which combine drawing and sculpture. Images of clouds and rain, drawn with dipping pen in lines of black ink, are held up by eccentric dowel-stick scaffolding. The effect is of a billboard, or the old Top Star drive-in screen that used to stand on a mine dump in the south of the city. But they are miniature versions, like something that belongs in Santarama Miniland, a model city also located in Johannesburg's south. As Sean O'Toole notes, these miniature storms are “monuments to the ephemeral”. Jonah says, “I like the idea of them as monuments. A monument is normally erected for things people do, or things that happen to people – massacres and wars. But the thunderstorms would go on whether we were here or not, so they're kind of tangential, or orthogonal, to the human world. They affect us, but they're also something of another kind – beyond even being 'other'.”

The Couple works are also composed of images and structures, but in this case the images are slides projected onto blank billboards. As with Thunderstorms, the scenes in the Couple slides create fragile memorials to the ephemeral, but in this case the subject has to do with human relationships, and with scenes of physical intimacy between people. In the projections, these scenes are held up to the light for a few moments – held still, but also animated by their transformation from drawing into projected light.

The Philosopher Kings series of drawings and slides, on the other hand, reflect the violence associated with the landscape. Several of the panels depict Jan Smuts, along with fragments of text and images associated with the 1922 Miners' Strike. The text refers to Smut's statement on 31 March 1922, when he said that he “feared that for a couple of days [the government] might lose control of the Rand, but they had decided to give the country an object lesson with reference to the subterranean, menacing dangers even at the risk of a couple of days revolution in Johannesburg.” (Hirson, The General Strike of 1922) Other drawings in the Philosopher Kings series refer to Cyril Ramaphosa and images from recent events at Marikana. Jonah says, “I don't mean to imply that Ramaphosa is the same as Smuts, in the sense of ordering a military attack on strikers. I think it's much murkier in his situation. What exactly he did, and what he meant by 'concomitant action', isn't as clear. But the parallel is obvious: these incredibly smart men, admirable in many ways, who get kind of swept up into taking very illiberal positions, very reactionary responses, in the face of the turmoil that gets dug up, as it were, with the mines.”

The Philosopher Kings drawings were made in order to be photographed and shown as slides. “The phrase in my mind is Kentridge's 'drawings for projection'. The fact that these drawings were only intended to be a means to an end - a way to create a slideshow rather than an artwork in their own right - was really liberating. It meant I didn't have to worry about every panel in the drawing being perfect. The story could come out in its own way, and this made the drawing process flow much more easily. Now I like the drawings on their own, too, but in the act of drawing them it was important to think of them only as a vehicle to get to someplace else. I think the projections help to slow the drawings down for people, and make the process of looking at them more like the process of drawing them: one panel at a time, waiting to see what happens and not really knowing what to expect from frame to frame.”
 
Jonah Sack would like to thank:
Gwydion Beynon, Carlo Mombelli, Josh Ginsburg, Ruth and Steven Sack, Kyle Morland, Jared Ginsburg, Stanley Sher, Gordon Froud, Tanya Sack, Alet Voster and Wilhelm van Rensburg, Rebecca Sher and Elijah Sack.

for Colin