When Autumn Comes: Strijdom Van der Merwe

Strijdom Van der Merwe
When Autumn Comes (2020)

Strijdom Van der Merwe
When Autumn Comes 
Medium: Autumn leaves
TLC Extension Collection
South Africa, May 2020

Commentary by Mark Auslander


Overview: Over thirty pressed tree leaves and leaf fragments, in autumn colors of oranges, reds and browns, are arranged within the shape of a circle. Darker hued fragments outline the perimeter and lighter colored full leaves are gathered towards the interior.

Artist's Statement: "The only constant is change." (Greek philosopher Heraclitus). Autumn reminds us that our bodies, minds, and surroundings are always changing. It focuses on the impermanence of life, emphasizing how fragile and ephemeral we are. The use of a circle to display the autumn leaves symbolises the notions of totality, wholeness, original perfection and the self. 

The corona-virus comes in the form of a circle, its origin is everywhere and its circumference is unknown. The virus has forced the world to retreat indoors and focus on cultivating a safe and comforting home. In a way, the autumn season offers us a chance to reconnect with ourselves as we preserve our safe havens. Autumn is a sign of the cycles, the beginning of the end and the birth of a new unknown.

 
Mark Auslander:  Like a number of other TLC-featured artists, including William Kentridge,  Ramarutha Makoba, Sue Martin, and Marco Cianfanelli, Strijdom Van der Merwe has been drawn to arboreal symbolism in contemplating the COVID-19 pandemic and its ramifying effects. This may be in part because trees, while undergoing seasonal periods of dormancy and near death (shedding dead leaves and accumulating lifeless tissue within their interior) nonetheless continue to rejuvenate themselves, Trees thus are poignant symbolic reservoirs for contemplating the mysteries of death and the regeneration of life. William Kentridge appropriately entitled his enigmatic tree image, which inaugurated this project, "Where Shall We Place our Hopes?": trees, which have life spans that arc across multiple human generations, often lend themselves to interrogative meditations on where we have come from, and where we, and our posterity, might be headed.  Van der Merwe's fallen leaves, redolent of the human dead lost to the pandemic, inspire us to ponder what has been taken from us, where the living's collective resilience might be found, and what will follow after.

Van der Merwe's assemblage might be read as a kind of constructed Fairy's Circle,  the remarkable natural phenomena caused by mushroom growth that produces a long-running circular necrotic zone (sometimes enduring for centuries) which extinguishes plant life above the underground mycelium network. In European folklore these rings are understood as sites of danger, enthrallment, and occasional blessing, where mortals can gain fleeting glimpses of the dancing shadow world. The artist incorporates beautiful fallen autumn leaves, harbingers of approaching winter, held within this sacred circle, evoking the shape of the feared circular novel coronavrius and of the interiority of the dwelling places in which we have self-quarantined.

The net effect of this carefully pieced-together, multi-color assemblage is rather like an ancient Roman mosaic, which adorned the interiors of private dwellings and public buildings. What might future archaeologists, uncovering and excavating the traces we have left behind from 2020, reconstruct of our shared dreams and nightmares from the time of Lockdown?

Viewed through the tumultuous lens of early June 2020 in the United States, Van der Merwe's lovely composition seems less a call for isolated, contemplative self-cultivation than a signal of outward-directed possibilities.  As with Lamie Joriege's video image of planting a seedling during Lockdown in Beirut,  I find myself recalling  the final words of Voltaire’s Candide, "il faut cultiver notre jardin” As I wrote in reference to Joriege, "[Voltaire's] phrase is sometimes misread as calling for a withdrawal from the world, but many scholars have convincingly argued that it sums up the book’s assault on abstract academic philosophy, and calls for a highly engaged, practically focused philosophy of practice, that will actively transform the world.  In this sense  Voltaire's conclusion anticipates Marx’s famous dictate in his Theses on Feuerbach, 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to change it'"

This could well be the credo of the thousands of protesters, who, denouncing the brutal death of George Floyd at the knee of a policeman and demonstrating against systemic racism, have flooded American streets, at considerable peril to their health  and safety in this continuing age of the virus, especially given the militarization of law enforcement.  The period of enforced confinement within our domestic circle seems to have catalyzed a period of reflection and righteous rage, a passionate insistence that a better world is possible. Our fallen leaves--that is to say, our honored dead lost to state violence and the viral pandemic--are best honored through reclaiming public space in concerted pursuit of social justice.

For more information:

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

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