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17/02/04
Karel Nel: Status of Dust
Art First Contemporary Art, 9 Cork Street, London, W1
9 November 2003-22 January 2004
Art First in London have been showing the work
of one of South Africa's most significant and interesting artists,
Karel Nel. The exhibition was first shown at Art First in New York.
Based in Johannesburg, Nel is Associate Professor of Fine Art at
the University of Witwatersrand. From there he travels for six months
of each year in the Pacific region, to Polynesia, Micronesia, Australia,
Easter Island, Réunion Island and to New York city. His colleague
at the University of Witwatersrand, David Bunn describes the way
of life and the impact on Nel's work:
Nel's obsessive travel is a direct source for that material
that constitutes his art. Through his journeys he attempts
to research those remaining places where precapitalist forms
of value persist, where objects used in transaction have
a charged ritual significance and weave distinct communities
into the same web of obligation. In such places fashioned
objects are not inert. Objects moving in the symbolic order
as gifts or icons have a role in constituting locality …
island communities especially tend to live at a human pace
and scale, in harmony with a natural order. Images of island
chains and volcanic cones are recurrent in the artist's
work … volcanic activity signifies the provisional
nature of all matter, and welling up over the crater rim,
magma tells a story of creative processes at the fiery core
of the earth.1
Karel Nel's knowledge and expertise of African art underpins his
approach to art; the implied political standpoint is also central
to his work. Jessica Dubow whose essay in the small catalogue accompanies
the exhibition, Status of Dust: A Profane Spirituality, A Radical
Materiality, describes Nel's work as a 'redemptive aesthetic'.
'Status of Dust' addresses notions of time and information that
relate to birth and death. The work displays the artist's interest
in site-specific pigments and initiatory practices, and art within
sacred contexts and remote cultures. The works refer to journeys
in time, historically and spiritually. The use of particular ochre,
for example, links a work to a specific place. At the same time
the works also represent a universality of experience.
Unorthodox materials give the works a particular resonance giving
several layers of meaning. His work shows the absorption of culture
and practice such as that of the Australian Aborigines, in particular
links between birth and place. Works on tapa cloth, a rare fabric
made from the pounded bark from ficus trees in Polynesia and Micronesia
allude to ghostly presences and ancient rituals. Nel's works emphasise
the process of creation which in turn links to the shared experience
of ancient but still living cultures that are often forgotten in
the modern world. The use of certain materials reinforces this message:
volcanic sand and black Carboniferous materials refer to prehistoric
times, to the geological history of a place. Referring to the work
'Cultural Ground', Dubow explains:
[It] not only relates to contemporary scientific advances
that illuminate the site specificity of the geological record.
It also speaks of a 'topological' aesthetic, the creative
understanding that where something is situated has everything
to do with how its substance is structured. Thus the work
does more than represent a particular spatial encounter.
It uncovers the layers that come between us and the granular
earth. It pays attention to the sensational textures that
form the perceptual base of place. Indeed, it is an art
that is topological precisely because it avoids the easy
reduction of nature to an image, and rather allows forms
to surface like fossils from their natural matrix.2
From his preoccupation with materials and materiality, Nel inhabits
an area informed by science, art and spirituality. The earth is
seen through geology and genius loci, memory and myth. He
uses a variety of ingenious methods such as floating heavyweight
handmade paper in a liquid medium to create island shapes, archipelagos
and delta shapes that are the subject matter for the work. Such
a process involves a degree of immersion, quite literally in the
very substance of the work. Green volcanic sand is then swept across
the picture plane. Nel goes so far as to pulp and recycle 18th century
French manuscript paper, 'the very stuff of the Enlightenment'.3
The finished works are highly disciplined abstract works which precipitate
a journey that navigates different realms of being.
In 2001, Karel Nel was Artist in Residence at the Ampersand Foundation
studio in New York, a few blocks away from the Twin Towers until
just four days before September 11. Early in January 2002 he returned
to New York and collected material from the site of the World Trade
Centre, which he incorporated in a number of works including 'Monument'
and 'Eleven'. The artist explains, 'the matter itself contains
the molecular memory of those events encoded in it; events which
shook New York, the world, and that will shape the beginning of
the 21st century'.4 David Bunn describes the significance of Nel's
September 11 works:
His interest in these works is not in recording details
of the catastrophe. It is for him instead a significant
marker of a shift in global subjectivity towards an irrevocably
transformed understanding of collective trust. The violet
background in the works captures his first view of the eerie
acetylene cast of the site when hundreds of rescue crew
labored beneath desperate arc lights. Similarly, the brown
hues result from the use of soil collected at Ground Zero
that has a specifically forensic and affective relationship
to the disaster.5
Nel's images acknowledge loss but they have also been created to
dignify the void created by such a shocking act.
But to look at these works is also to see how their abstracted
slabs of earth begin to cue a perception of the Twin Towers.
Ruins, dust, aura: the absent presence, the molecular memory,
of that which is not physically there. 'Monument' and 'Eleven'
… are also about how we may take recourse to the inhibiting
spirits of the past and of place. In this sense, the very
materials of these works begin to intimate the dust of memory
from which new flights of imagination might depart.6
Dr Janet McKenzie
References
1. David Bunn, Breath Alphabet: Karel Nel and the History of Division.
A personal encounter with the artist and his work. Karel Nel, Status
of Dust. ArtFirst, New York, Garrett White/Five Ties, Inc., p.18.
2. Jessica Dubow, Status of Dust: A Profane Spirituality, A Radical
Materiality, ibid, p.6.
3. Bunn, ibid, p.20
4. Karel Nel quoted by Dubow, ibid, p.11
5. Bunn, ibid, p.23
6. Dubow, ibid, p.11.
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