Depths in Feet: Gerhard Marx

A Conversation: Pamela Allara, David Bunn, and Mark Auslander

Overview: Day 20 of South Africa's The Lockdown Collection features a work by Gerhard Marx, from his "Depths in Feet" series. These collage-like images are produced through placing segments of reconstituted maps on irregularly shaped boards  Legends and other notations from maps are reproduced; specific land features are not always discernible. The color palette is muted, primarily grays, browns and greens

Depths in Feet (Doubled Interior), 2016 seems organized around a central parallelogram that can be read as denoting in receding perspective a room, with a front door, consisting of a front and rear wall in pale greens, with hues corresponding to height elevations partially marked in a legend to the left .  (Side lines that would normally describe the side of the room do not proceed along the floor but rather go up to the upper corners of the rear wall, which itself could also be viewed as an elevated front wall)  This "room" is backed with many light paper fragments, some triangular, other rectangles or parallelograms.  This assemblage is superimposed over a large rectangle in the same pale green hue.  In a line along the top of the image, "behind" the rear wall, are arrayed four simplified maps of the North Atlantic region, some with countries blacked in. A more extensive North Atlantic map, showing the North American continent, is discernible in the image's right center, on the "floor," as it were of the main room.
___________________________________________________________ 

Gerhard Marx Depths in Feet (Doubled Interior) 2016

Artist's Statement:   “The Depths in Feet works started a line within my own work that continues today, and which I actively engaged with during the lockdown period. In these works I return to the idea of (visual) distance. Within the restrictive surface-area of each canvas, I set myself the task of exploring the possibilities of describing depths, volumes and distances. By playing with, manipulating and confusing the geometries that traditionally describe three dimensional space (the spatial relation between objects, ground and horizonline, what is in front and what is behind etc.), the work starts to propose impossible volumes, leading the eye into a depth of spacial imaginaries.

I have worked on these maps during this peculiar time of enforced ‘social disctancing’. This is a time of great uncertainty and vulnerability. It is a time in which the virtual flourishes to bring a sense of togetherness, desperate to breach ‘across’. But it is also a rare time where there is a sudden emphasis on the physical, and specifically on the value of the spaces between, an emphasis on spatial distribution (and the impossibility thereof). It is a strange time where we look after each other, but not at each other. Where we paradoxically care for each other, not through intimacy, but through distance. In this time distance is a thick, tangible presence. Distance does not slip away, instead distance is ‘kept’. Distance has perhaps never been so close."
___________________________________________________________  

Edwards family. Oswego, Kansas. 1950
Cousin Kitty on Bucky the sheep.
Mindy, Pam (the author). Roxy to the side

I. Pamela Allara:   Growing up in the 1950s, my sisters and I each summer were packed into the back seat of the family’s Ford ‘woody’ station wagon to drive from New York to Kansas to visit our grandparents. To keep us occupied on the long drive, our parents provided us with a map of the United States, one large enough to share between us. As we traveled, we could chart our progress, and also learn a bit about the topography of each state. From the front seat our mother would quiz us on state capitals. Thus, my initial knowledge of the country of my birth was derived from a map.

Today, paper maps, awkwardly folded and stuffed in the family car’s side pocket, are a rarity. We continue to use maps frequently when driving or navigating and unfamiliar location, but these are virtual maps supplied by Google. Gerhard Marx’s Depths in Feet (Doubled Interior) references the past simply through his use of (discarded) maps. However, the maps used here are from North America, hence my childhood memory of maps was immediately jogged. No doubt the references to inches, feet and miles register differently for the South African audience, who are accustomed to measurements are in centimeters and kilometers. I would argue that the use of the imperial system vs. the metric system speaks broadly of the history of colonialism. Thus, I am jolted out of my nostalgic daydreaming. The formally balanced design of this handsome artwork is suggestive of the deceptively objective information provided by a map. In this way, the viewer is drawn to the work, only to have one’s initial expectations undermined.

As Mark Auslander makes clear below, maps have always served a political function, marking out boundaries created by those in power to permit freedom of movement for some and to restrict it for others. Here the artwork’s relevance to South Africa’s history is obvious, but it is equally pertinent to the United States’ history of segregation, past and continuing. Paper maps may have been replaced by virtual ones, but their political import remains. For example, in preparation for the upcoming re-U.S. Presidential election, the Republican Party has been busily re-drawing the electoral maps so that electoral votes are skewed in its direction. The undermining of democracy though the drawing and redrawing of maps to secure power permanently is the goal. Marx’s torn and fragmented North American maps thus have that second personal resonance, speaking to a period of dissonance, division, and lawlessness in the United States.

Although Marx’s source materials were territorial maps, when reconstituted on board, the result resembles the ground plan of a private home, or perhaps two overlapping plans. The ‘folds’ of the map cause the image to flicker between two and three dimensions; some of the ‘folds’ in the window-like blue-green sections might even be read as aerial views of buildings. In a period where we are confined inside, peering at the eerily still and silenced streets and houses outside, the composition speaks directly to our physical isolation and to the desire to return to freedom of movement and direct interactions with family and colleagues. But even as the walls seem to close in on us, the cell phone and the internet offer a way out for those who are privileged to have access to them. (The lockdown has merely reinforced what was happening anyway; the people I pass on my walks share the physical space, but mentally they are on their cell phones, unaware of the surrounding environment.) Simply put, intimacy is increasingly virtual. As Marx notes, “we paradoxically care for each other, not through intimacy, but through distance. “

Depths In Feet (Doubled Interior) is about doubling, of ground plans of rooms, of interior and exterior spaces. As a result, it is difficult to find a single location in which to imaginatively come to rest.  In J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), the protagonist states, “In a life of writing books, I have often…been lost in a maze of doubting. The trick I have learned is to plant a sign or marker in the ground where I stand, so that in my future wanderings I shall have something to return to…” (J.M. Coetzee, Foe. Johannesburg: 1986, 135).  Many people are using the time freed by the lockdown for introspection, for probing identities and values. These are the stable markers to return to after our wanderings recommence.
___________________________________________________________

II. David Bunn:

Lightly Up, Heavy Down

Frontispiece

Suddenly we are inside, locked, to misquote Auden, in the cell of ourselves. In this unnatural, inhuman contraction, we long for a language that would communicate our feelings with special, embodied immediacy. Gerhard Marx’s exquisite and painstakingly surgical dissection and reassemblage of thousands of topographical and hydrological map fragments speaks to that longing, and to the poignancy of separate spheres.

Between two generations of Johannesburg artists such as William Kentridge, Willem Boshoff, and Jeremy Wafer, on the one hand, and the younger Gerhard Marx on the other, there has been a longstanding conversation about post-minimalism and the much earlier experiments in non-rational, Dadaist techniques such as automatic writing and cutups. Working collaboratively in William Kentridge’s studio, and on sets for Kentridge’s palimpsistic stage productions, Gerhard Marx retained a strongly independent line of thought.

So often in Gerhard’s work there is a tension between two visual languages: the one is the cartographer’s process, beginning with 1:10 000 aerial photographs, and the use of photogrammetry to produce larger scale 1:50 000 (for instance) cartographic detail, the stuff in trade of surveyors in the era before remote sensing. Cutting through scores of these charts, Gerhard produces a form of collage in which a different mapping of routes, desires, and representation begins to appear. This is akin to what urban planners call “desire lines”: stand on any street corner, and you will see the paths across vacant lots created by pedestrians eager to make time to destinations on routes not formally plotted by the city street grid. Signatures of our bodies and desired destinations are thus legible across other plans.

The painstaking process Gerhard has invented and pursued all these years pricks out new logics and representations from the welter of cartographic detail in many maps. To that, now, he is adding reference to cursive script, and I think it’s appropriate that we should speak about handwriting itself.

Ink

William Kentridge and I went to the same school, in the same year. As eight-year-olds at King Edward VII Primary School, we were taught the first elements of copperplate, cursive writing. Our sloping oak desks each had an inkwell at the top, with a small ceramic pot containing ink with a oaken scent that to this day is still evocatively lodged in my memory. Learning cursive script, in the direct method of ink and a dipping pen, was a magical process: the risky transfer of the ink, the unforgiveable blot, and the firm dictum “lightly up, heavy down” that guided the making of volume in each letter. For me, that modulation in the letters seemed to communicate the emotional weight of the scribes’ varying intent. Philosopher Jacques Derrida spoke so richly about our longing for a kind of writing that would be immediate, full of the original voice of the subject:

I always dream of a pen that would be a syringe, a suction point rather than that very hard weapon with which one must inscribe, incise, choose, calculate, take ink.… [W]hereas here, once the vein has been found, no more toil, no responsibility, no risk of bad taste or violence, the blood delivers itself all alone, the inside gives itself up.

I have one of William Kentridge’s great drawings on my wall now: it is a sketch of a bird, a spotted ground thrush he made for me, drawn on a page from a nineteenth-century Italian accountant’s ledger book, with exquisite copperplate entries. The charcoal halo from which the bird appears is in contrast with the exquisite double entry ledger. These are two complementary types of mark, or “facture,’ the emotional gestures of the creator, as the older art historians used to call it.

From Me to You

Gerhard Marx.  Distant (Coil), 2019
Reconfigured Map fragments
 on Acrylic-Polyurethane Ground and Canvas
60 x 50cm

How different this is from Gerhard Marx’s magnificent thinking about cursive script in a work like Distant (Coil).

Thinking about this image: first, there is the ground made up of a thousand little dissected pieces, reassembled in a planar composition (before the printmaking conversion). Over that (it seems) a formal coil unfurls, in a downward spiral; its spiraling cherry-red arcs are perspectivally modeled, as approaching and receding loops. Put another way, they also retain that older, schooled logic of the handwriting instructor—lightly up, heavy down.

We live in a world of tumbling, isolated fragments, where the breath of the virus is increasingly the only generalizing thing.  Yet emerging from all this, as an intricate new pattern, there is a kind of metronomic handwriting, a memory of the paths and locales we knew, that joins us and bears the weight, occasionally, of our compounded feelings. Sheltering in place (to use the American phrasing), the poor in South Africa’s Kliptown, Lillydale B, or Mamelodi will feel this isolation differently and the effects of the plague are unequally distributed. Emerging eventually and blinking in the sharp light, and to a changed world economy, they will seek out again their familiar, unscripted routes. Perhaps only the memory of those routes will remain: the linkages between home and work, or forest edge and marketplace, are newly defined by the pace and agency of zoonotic diseases. Novel landscapes will emerge, and it is in this world now coming into focus, as a condition of fragments, that we will all have to live.

___________________________________________________________

III. Mark Auslander:

Unprecedented? 

It has become commonplace to remark that the Lockdown of 2020 is “unprecedented.” My reading of Gerhard Marx’s “Depths in Feet” series, however, is that even though (as Pam notes) the maps used come from the USA, the works highlight the ways in which mobility in South Africa was for generations highly restricted, especially for the black majority. The idealized promise of an unfurled map, of free movement across land and sea in romantic voyages of discovery, is gestured to in “Double Interior” (2016) through the repeated microcosmic motif of the North Atlantic. Each miniature map is enclosed within endlessly folded fragments of other maps, a reminder perhaps that this ocean, that for some meant thrilling journeys of pilgrimage and self-fashioning, for millions of others, especially from the African continent, occasioned coerced voyages under conditions of unimaginably vile, violent confinement.

Discontinuous

To my eyes, at least, the discontinuous folds and overlays in Marx’s surfaces evoke the truncated topographies of South Africa under Apartheid for people of color, divided by Bantustans, “separate development,” pass laws, labor preference areas, land expropriation, residential segregation, the Separate Amenities Act, and legal restrictions on love itself. The racialized social organization of space under grand and petty Apartheid ensured that the dreams of free mobility, across an unfolded map, were limited to the better-resourced segments of the white minority. For millions of black men, mobility was undertaken under conditions of great restriction, from homeland to mine hostel and back again. One reading of the series’ title, “Depths in Feet” would allude to this history: untold pairs of feet trudged across stony ground from the Transkei, Basutoland, Mozambique, and points north, in order to descend into the lower depths of the Rand’s mine shafts.

The interrupted surfaces and glimpsed color-coded profundities of Marx’s recombined maps in “Depths in Feet,” put me in mind of one of the most brilliant explorations of Apartheid-inflected  space and place, the protagonist’s circular journey in J.M. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K. As he encounters patrols and roadblocks during his pilgrimage from Sea Point into the Karoo and back again, Michael K dreams of discovering a route that would somehow evade these human made impediments, allowing him and his mother free flow across the landscape, which he longs to grasp as a continuous whole. This proves impossible for most of the text, as he passes from one interrupted segment of topography to another, narrowly escaping at one point a farmer who want to employ him, forever stringing barb wire across sections of the veld: “You have a good feel for wire,” the farmer says.

Michael K’s moment of reprieve only comes at the book’s end, when he ceases to move across an endlessly barricaded landscape and instead, in his mind’s eye, plunges deep into the earth, becoming one with underground reservoirs of water, evading all the human-imposed discontinuities of the surface world. In a prophetic vision, he sees himself repeatedly lowering a teaspoon into a deep well. He “would lower it down the shaft deep into the earth, and when he brought it up there would be water in the bowl of the spoon; and in that way, he would say, one could live.”

States of Siege

To be sure, there are innumerable novel circumstances to the present Lockdown. We are living now in a state of siege, lodged within insecure sanctuaries, from which we survey, through television, computer, and smart phone, an outside world which we thought we knew, but which becomes less familiar each day. We find ourselves in a comparable position to the Magistrate in J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, who knows little of the frontier that surrounds the small outpost where he is stationed, relying only on maps, “patched ... together from travelers' accounts over a period of ten or twenty years.“  Only our maps have been rapidly assembled, and re-scrambled, over the past ten or twenty hours, as we try to patch together the contours, changing at dizzying speed, of the unfolding pandemic and its continuous aftershocks. In this brave new world, Gerhard Marx’s discontinuous, overlapping, and patchwork maps are the fitting guidebook of our nearly unfathomable truncated everyday experience.

In the era of Lockdown and anxious social distancing, even the most interior household spaces, our supposed sanctuaries, become disorienting and destabilizing. Our houses and apartments, which should be places of rest and recuperation after a day out in the world, now become the measure of our whole existence, 24/7, punctuated, at least for non-essential workers. with brief forays out for marketing and other vital matters. Each return home through a dwelling door, like the ones signaled on two sides of Marx’s green-walled room, is fraught. How much should we sanitize our groceries, our clothes, or our pets, lest we potentially infect our home and our loved ones?  We find ourselves wandering within our tiny domestic kingdom,  in which everything looks the same, but everything seems different: our familiar mental map of the domestic is inevitably distorted, as we sail the strange seas of this seemingly incessant emergency.

M.C. Escher, Waterfall. 1961

Such is the topsy-turvy world that Gerhard Marx now evokes for us through his scissored, razored, folded over, and reconstituted map fragments. In “Doubled Interior” we can look at the central room in at least two different ways, in a manner that emulates the famous optical trick of the drawing of a cube, which flips as we stare at it over time:  the bottom rectangle could be the front wall of the room, or alternately the top rectangle could be the front wall.Matters are further confused by the lines that run from the ‘front’ to ‘back’ walls, which diagonally run from the top of one wall to the bottom of the other, rather like M.C. Escher’s impossible constructions.

Lines of Descent

In our moment of proliferating mass death, Marx’s title, “Depths in Feet,” takes on a chilling meaning that was presumably unintended when the artist began the series, before the pandemic. As we all, in the wee hours, envision ourselves or our loved ones interred “six feet under,” (the very distance we are commanded, in the US, to maintain between the living) are we looking into a strange kind of distorted grave?  Are the different shades of color, keyed to a legend indicating distances, soundings down into a deep pit that might have no bottom?  Is that the “double interior” we gaze at in the image, pondering, with an uncertain timetable, the potential hour of our deaths?

And yet, by encasing our midnight terrors within the fragmentary, jutted frame of Depths in Feet, might the artist, paradoxically, be freeing us from those fears, signaling a new moment of reprieve?  Locked indoors, haunted by the visceral specter of contact tracing, we cannot find the solution to all that ails us in conventional reckonings across the surfaces of our dwellings, or of our lives, or any visible spaces charted in normal, unfolded maps. All is truncated, blockaded, restricted, locked down. We must descend, to rediscover our long forgotten roots, to sense what the deep earth might have to tell us. We thus might come to sense unmapped subterranean aquifers, those inner oceans that know no boundaries, allowing us once more to know the blessings of interior water, the very medium in which we came into being. And ,“in that way,” we might say with Michael K, “one could live.”