Unprecedented Times: Clement Mohale

Clement Mohale
Unprecedented Times
Mixed Media
(TLC Student Collection, South Africa, 2020)

Overview: A young woman in a blue blouse hold out her palm, bearing a large red and yellow  pill or capsule, to a a male figure, whose bent head is a greenish novel coronavirus. Behind her is another male figure, whose head is a locked safe with a combination lock. In the distance several figures walk through a sparse township street, facing a sign warning "Caution Danger of Covid-19."


Artist's Statement:  My artwork represents the unprecedented Covid-19 epidemic
which has left the world at a standstill. The work communicates the awareness and effects of the Coronavirus. These include the limitations of human movement due to the imposed lockdown regulations. Thus, the use of entangled lines in my work represents the impact of emotional, physical and spiritual wellbeing based on the changes on the normal daily routines. In a pandemic characterized by extreme uncertainty it is unclear as to when a vaccine will be made
available.

Pamela Allara: The three main figures in Mohale’s mixed media work together represent the risks, dangers and desperate hope of the populace during the coronavirus. At the left rear, the tall figure with the head of a safe personifies the lockdown. The safe is filled with fragments of bodies, exemplifying the lockdown’s resulting widespread claustrophobia. At the center is a thin, anxious woman, who holds a pill in her extended hand. Ignoring the lockdown, she has ventured outdoors to directly confront the virus, who inspects her offering. This confrontation is a scene of desperation. When one is seriously ill, one is willing to try anything that might offer a cure, or even some relief. The woman awaits the coronavirus’ verdict, as does society as a whole. 

David Coplan:  Is the corona-headed figure the virus or someone who has it? Is the pill a cure, and if so for whom? An offering or a question? And the box camera headed figure? Voyeuristic documentation of futility?

When days are dark, friends are few.

Mark Auslander: In "The Aesthetic Significance of the Face," sociologist Georg Simmel (1901) famously argues that the complexity of the human face, allowing for intricate mirroring and improvisational modification of the mirrored faces of our interlocutors, highlights the core dialectic of revelation and concealment that is at the heart of human social existence.  We are bound to one another through the mutual exchange of glances and facial expression, yet often deceived precisely by those exchanges. Hence,  Simmel suggests, the enormous importance in the history of art of the face, which while foregrounding the unity of the person, simultaneously summons up all we can know, and cannot know, of our fellow social beings.

Simmel's insights are helpful, I suggest, in unpacking Mohale's enigmatic scene. The invisible enemy of the virus is distinctly faceless, and the restrictions of the Lockdown greatly limit our conventional capacity to engage in face-to-face interaction with others.  We do not know if those whom we encounter in the course of our everyday lives are infectious hosts of the virus, and how risky any interaction with them might be. The general uncertainty of social life is thus enormously increased at this moment of trial.  The two figures who surrounds the young woman emphatically lack the vital feature, the face, through which we normally seek to assess other people's motivations and agendas: one with a large spiked virus head, and the other with the head of a locked safe, redolent of the Lockdown itself.

The young woman presents with an open palm an offered medicinal capsule, perhaps evocative of the hoped-for vaccine, to the monstrous virus-headed male figure, who seems to lower his head to inspect it. Lacking access to recognizable facial features, neither she, nor the viewer, has any way of assessing if the offered gift will be accepted or reciprocated. The looming figure behind her ,with the locked safe in the place of its head, is equally closed to her and to us.

In contrast to the dense heaviness of the foreground figures (drawn as the artist notes with entangled lines evocative of stasis and paralysis) the background scene is striking for its use of negative space. The regular energy, the buzz, the musicality of township life are all palpably absent. Two sparsely drawn male figures, wearing hats and casting long shadows, proceed along a path that is blocked by the sign warning of the disease. we see their backs, but their faces are lost to us as well.  We might see a market woman bearing wares on her head, but her face is distinctly in shadow. The only face we are able to behold is that of the plaintive young woman, avatar for Everyman and Everywoman during the Lockdown, bargaining for her life with a faceless being that emphatically refuses to reciprocate her gaze or extend a hand.  Such is the soul-crushing isolation and anxiety of our current moment.




References

Georg Simmel, “The Aesthetic Significance of the Face [1901