July 28, 2006
By Lucille Davie
RUSSIA will be put in place in the entrance to the Origins Centre by the end of July, says artist Walter Oltmann.
Russia in Joburg in a museum on the origins of man? It's easy to explain. Oltmann is one of the artists involved in the creation of the city's newest museum, the Origins Centre, on the Wits University campus in the inner city. He has sculpted a magnificent wire world in the entrance, depicting the migration of the world's earliest people from southern Africa to the rest of the world. The last piece of the world to go in place is Russia.
"I am quite pleased with the work," he says, "it has a sense of translucency."
He has achieved that translucency by means of "flowing ribbons", a process of coiling and weaving lightweight aluminium by hand. The artwork, which flows in metal waves up three dark chocolate walls, traces the route humans first took from Africa to the rest of the world by means of a single copper thread.
The R40-million museum, a year or two in the making, opened in March this year on the Wits University campus, and focuses on the origins and customs of the Bushmen or San, probably the world's oldest people.
The museum opens with ancient digging and hunting flints of stone, dated between 2,6 million years and 60 000 years, with drawers filled with different primate skulls. Around the corner is a huge stuffed, dying eland, with footage showing how Bushmen hunted and killed this buck. Behind you is an exhibition showing how dyes used in Bushmen cave art were made.
Touch screens, monitors and big screens run with footage explaining Bushmen culture, their ancient healing practices and enduring customs. It's all enhanced by the addition of the fine and extraordinary artworks of Oltmann, Willem Boshoff, Tamar Mason and Russell Scott.
Walter Oltmann
Oltmann says the work took him a year to do. He works on his own, usually doing several pieces at once.
"The idea was already there – the design had to enhance the space," says Oltmann, who was commissioned by project director Francis Gerard.
He describes the creation as being done organically, and it certainly has a feel of growing naturally. He likes the contrast of the cave-like element of the artwork with the rigidity of the building.
Oltmann specialises in large works – his 11m high wire sculpture in the foyer of the Absa Towers North in the CBD, depicting replicas of carved African stools, takes the breath away.
Oltmann uses several metals to create his art – copper, brass and aluminium are his favourites. He orders the softest grades from the manufacturer. He has tried a bit of bronze casting, he says, and he draws as well.
He has had over a dozen exhibitions, starting in 1981. He has won four awards, the most recent the Standard Bank Young Artist, in 2001, and there are collections of his work in significant galleries around the country.
At the opening in Durban of the Standard Bank Young Artist touring exhibition, fellow artist Andrew Verster said of Oltmann: "This artist takes ordinary things, things we know, and he changes them by weaving them in wire much bigger than they are. And so they become totally fresh . . . This is his genius, the transformation of the commonplace so that the mundane becomes poetic."
Willem Boshoff
Another artist whose work sparkles in the museum is
Willem Boshoff, an artist whose work deals with the use and content of language and art. The work, called "Signs of people", consists of some 1 200 perspex words floating in a double-volume space, with a revolving light reflecting the words onto the surrounding walls and floor. The effect of this is that visitors to the museum see the words move slowly across their bodies when standing underneath the work.
Boshoff says this is the first time he has had one of his artworks "so high up in the air". His works are often hard, concrete objects, like huge boulders with words or sentences embossed on them, or beautifully crafted wooden boxes that come apart, or half-metre-high boxes with intriguing sculptures inside, especially created for the blind.
The piece for the museum saw him working on and off for two years – the research takes a long time, he says.
The words are a range of different names given to southern African people; some, like the Hottentot, now extinct.
He says his intention with the floating words was to capture the image of termite wings floating down to the earth, after emerging from their mounds after the rain. The termites leave the mound only once in their lives and only once a year.
"Fleeting raindrops, endless white flowers, the termites and their transitory wings inspired a sense of worship in the Bushmen and arouse in me a great love of nature and the Kalahari. I hoped I could communicate some of the awe I feel by my translucent materials suspended in a spectacle of light and air."
The termites don't fly very far before they lose their wings and fall to the ground.
"The termites' precarious flight speaks to me of risk and vulnerability – not all of them make it."
Boshoff relates this to the loss of languages. "In southern Africa we have likewise witnessed the death of a number of languages such as Nama and Griqua. Some others are on the brink of extinction."
His point is that the children of those whose languages are no longer heard are still around, and have been absorbed into other groups, speaking different languages.
"Itinerant termites and people venture away from ‘home', often to colonise, often to be obliterated. The location of a new home depends on how far our ‘wings' can carry us," he explains.
To emphasise the vulnerability of languages, they are gently whispered from speakers on the wall. "They are whispered almost as if they are secrets in need of protection."
In all, it has been a satisfying process, says Boshoff. "I am very pleased with the final effect. It's nice when the light catches the words – they're like sparks, fireworks. I don't usually make things like this."
Tamar Mason
What Gerard describes as the "crowning glory", is a set of 11 wallhangings, positioned on the tall wall in the largest room of the museum.
Sarah Baartman depicted in one of the wall hangings
The rectangular black cloth hangings are 4.5m tall by 2m wide, beautifully embroidered with thread, glass and egg-shell beads, safety pins, and finished with fabric paint.
The creation of artist Tamar Mason, with the help of several dozen rural women, follows the unhappy history of the Bushmen in southern Africa under the following titles: origins of people; hunting and gathering; trance dance; arrivals; settled life; Sara Baartman; genocide; cultural appropriation; modern life; death and disease; and, the future.
Mason says it was "a wonderful project to work on – we used incredible images to tell the story". She's particularly happy with the beadwork.
The images include snakes, like a rain snake or a snake in the graveyard of an Aids victim; predators like lions and leopards, significant animals in Bushman folklore; and the hoodia plant, an appetite suppressant used by the Bushmen and now being marketed worldwide by Pfizer.
Mason says she sketched the images with help from several other artists, then presented them to groups of women around the country, using an epidiascope, a machine similar to an overhead projector, which enlarges images.
She even brought 10 women from Kwaggafontein in Mpumalanga to stay with her at her home near Nelspruit, to work on the project.
Eight women worked at the Bus Factory on the hangings, and 60 women from the Winterveld in North West province also made a contribution.
Mason does skills training with rural women around the country, teaching them embroidery, appliqué, tin work and jewellery making. She has exhibited her clay works at various galleries, and is at present working on creating life-size clay figures of women.
Russell Scott
Sculptor
Russell Scott has left his mark in the museum with a wonderfully whimsical set of wooden creatures, magically floating on branches that protrude from an anthill. They are modelled on Bushmen figures, with elegant, striding legs depicting half-man, half-animal creatures.
The display hall exhibiting Russell Scott’s contribution to the museum
The piece is called the Axis Mundi, translated to mean "world axis" or the "connection between earth and heaven". In Bushmen culture the shaman transverses (?) the axis and brings back knowledge of the spiritual world.
Scott says he has not done spiritual Bushmen creatures before. "Some of the images are astounding. When you use them, you create something magical and spiritual."
Several of the beautifully crafted creatures Scott has created have chicken heads, symbolic of shamans and their flight into the spirit world. Segments of a rain snake protrude from an adjacent wall – signifying its communion with the spirit world behind the wall or rock.
Scott, who sees himself as a craftsman as well as an artist, said he was "surprised" when he went back to view his work – "it's definitely got a presence, it's a nice thing".
He says it was a collaborative effort, working with two artists from Pretoria and people in his workshop. He sees this as advantageous, with different people doing things differently, bringing varied perspectives to the work.
He used a variety of woods – tambootie, leadwood, pine and eucalyptus. He says he started off being fussy, just using eucalyptus wood, but after a while "started thinking like Bushmen", and used what was available and practical.
He says the Axis Mundi piece is now influencing other assignments he is working on. He is busy with a decorative fireplace and finds himself using the remainder of the materials, and even elements of the methods he used for the museum work. "You can't help but being influenced by the previous work."
He normally works in a range of materials – perspex, metals, glass, polyurethane – and does a lot of commercial work, mixing fine art with corporate and advertising work. One of his works, a bronze newspaper seller, is on display in the Fox Street Mall in the CBD.
Whimsical images in wood by Russell Scott
He is "very pleased" to be exhibiting with the likes of Boshoff and Oltmann. He describes Boshoff as his hero, who taught him in the early stages of his own career, while he has "huge admiration" for Oltmann.
There's much more in the museum to absorb - it's not worth going unless you have at least half a day to take in and ponder the exhibits.
Project director Gerard, who worked with the team at the Origins Centre for over a year, says he was hoping that the museum would make visitors think and react to it, not just give them information in the abstract.
"We want to touch the soul," he says, adding that he "thrilled with the outcome".
He is also advising the museums at Robben Island and the Cradle of Humankind. The second part of the museum, which will address the Big Bang, is scheduled to open in 2008.
The footage, the enchanting music, the graphic images, the spectacular artwork, the voices which talk to you from screens and monitors, bring alive a people who have not encumbered themselves with the often unnecessary trappings of modern society; a people who truly understand their origins.
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