New Territories: Bevan de Wet

Bevan de Wet

New Territories

Etching with chine-collé

TLC Extension Collection (South Africa, 2020)

Overview: Etching, two images of a plant, reversed. Left image on dark background, right image with light background..

Artist's Statement:  In my current practice, I am exploring man’s growing sense of alienation from the natural environment. Being forced to stay indoors, and not interact is certainly exacerbating this feeling, further estranging us from our surroundings and communities. Distancing ourselves from nature, our perceptions of it are distorted and idyllicised through digital media.

My garden becomes a site for inspiration, meditating on an invasive plant, a common weed, and revisiting it in an abstracted and disconnected sense. It becomes a new way of mapping our immediate spaces. Since mapping has a history of colonialism, of plotting “unchartered” space, this practice of construction and deconstruction attempts to reverse and re-imagine, in a sense unoccupying space. By working with a combination of structure and chance, allows for a vulnerable space that evokes a sense of uncertainty and otherworldliness.

By embracing change, I aim to highlight the ephemeral cycle of creation and disintegration. This practice becomes an allegory for the breakdown of our ancestral values, and the fragmented nature of our engagement with space and our connection to the world.

William Blake, Jerusalem, Plate 91

Mark Auslander: On plate 91 of his mystical visionary poem Jerusalem, William Blake famously writes, "he who wishes to see a Vision; a perfect Whole / Must see it in its Minute Particulars."  Blake illustrates the plate with a vision of the fallen hero Los, despondent yet mystically interconnected to enigmatic minute shapes that will help in time reveal the general forms he seeks.  Significantly, these mystic shapes are bound to each side of the prone figure, hinting at the interior duality of being that will time be overcome and integrated.

Blake was referring to the impulse to grasp the full measure of Divinity, but his insight equally applies to current struggles to understand the entire global ecosystem, including the dynamic entanglements of human and nature at this moment of crisis.  In this etching Bevan de Wet concentrates our gaze on the "minute particulars" of a single invasive weed found growing freely in his garden during Lockdown, which on close examination hints at the vast "Whole" of our present condition, as we stand on the eve of entering a new, uncharted era.

Through our present-day anxious eyes, the alien's weed's strands might be read as analogous to the novel coronavirus itself, with single strands of viral RNA (lacking the double helix of DNA that are foundational to "life" as we usually define it) that threaten to hijack the interior operations of our normal cells. As a virus that is both an invasive pathogen and a re-progammer of our inner being, SARS-CoV-2 is both  "us" and "not us," confounding normal distinctions between self and other. Hence, it is perhaps appropriate that this diptych presents a mirrored symmetrical vision, in opposite exposures, of this strangely beautiful organism.

We are now face to face with our shadow selves, unleashed, it would appear by our species' rapid and uncontrolled expansion into previously wild ecosystems, coming into every closer contact with bats and other organisms that function as generative hosts for new and emerging viruses.  Long term solutions to this and other viral pandemics will require critical and rigorous self-examination across the looking glass: what new protocols of human-natural balance might be re-calibrated as we struggle to live successfully with all manner of life across the biosphere?

In his statement De Wet references the long history of colonial mapping as a technology of domination, reducing the ostensibly "empty" territory of conquered and occupied land into projections of the colonizer's fantasies. These historical dynamics are particularly salient in South Africa, in which mapping has for centuries been an instrument of surveillance, land alienation, population removal, and terror. The dark left face of the lithograph could be read as evoking the "Dark Continent" of Africa in the colonial imagination, a darkness which for Joseph Conrad was an outer projection of the rage and violence burning in the white European soul. Presenting the dark and light exposures of the plant as mirror images of one another is perhaps a strategy for undoing the colonial fantasy of unbridgeable racial difference, a reminder of the fundamental unity of being across seeming lines of difference.

As Jean and John Comaroff argue in Of Revelation and Revolution, Vol. 2, non-comformist protestant mission gardens on the southern African colonial frontier were performative enactments of the civilizing mission, producing in microcosm the hoped-for transformation of the wild into the domestic, the purposeless into the practical. They were also structured as seeds of change, that would fructify surrounding African indigenous communities, spreading the values of husbandry, industry, and the cult of domesticity. Mission horticulture and agriculture began with the clearing of "weeds," the imposition of cultigens in rows, irrigated  and plowed according to routinized discipline. So too would the hearts and minds of African converts, the theory went, be rendered disciplined, punctual, and industrious according to the reigning protocols of rational modernity, liberated from the weeds of "idleness"  and "superstition" that were held by missionaries to be the primary African curses. 

De Wet offers us an alternate vision, a meticulous charting of a wild plant, volunteering its way within the garden, free to pursue its own course of growth and development, honored through careful observation and sensitive artistic rendition.  Like Blake's mystic vision in Plate 91 of the prone hero Los, connected to "minute particulars" from each flank, this delicate exploration is figured symmetrically, hinting at a unified whole as we venture forward, with fear, hesitation and a sense of wonder, into the "new territories" ahead.

References

William Blake Jerusalem:  The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804–1820) ,

Jean and John Comaroff, 1997. Of Revelation and Revolution, Vol 2.  The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

For more information:

www.artistproofstudio.co.za
 https://www.thelockdowncollection.com/extension-collection

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