Joyce Ozynski
A few weeks ago I was at Art On Main, and I popped into one of the smaller galleries. There was a work consisting of three straightened twigs tied together at the top to form a tepee, a gorilla suit with various surrealistic modifications and a third one which I don’t remember.
Conceptual art has become the predominant mode of expression. After abstraction more or less exhausted itself, artists were anxious to continue to define themselves being part of high culture and learning – even philosophy.
The inscrutability of abstraction had not after all proved to be an insurmountable obstacle to public approval and significant sales. Conceptual art also sought to distance itself from the seeming vulgarity of pop art and heavily emphasised indeterminacy and ambiguity. It aspired to philosophy and sometimes physics.
Narrative became a plaything of endlessly looping videos showing mysterious shapes. There was a small infusion of sociology and statements of social conscience in easily decodable works – but too mild and meek – and their message was undermined by an elegance worthy of a high end advert.
IN the 70s and 80s art history changed, merging with social history, sociology and politics. The power of leftwing views exerted itself strongly placing art and artists in a socio economic and historical setting. This robbed the artist of his elevated status which had been the standard of all art history books. The concept of genius was debunked with great vigour.
This fresh approach and new research revealed artists as bound to the political and religious objectives of their patrons. A hierarchy of subject matter had been imposed over the centuries through the academies with classicist moralism at the top and landscape at the bottom.
Even as late as the 19th century Manet could exclaim that a painting was nothing without its frame.
All this revealed a rude practicality and a modesty which had been occluded by art historians and art lovers.
Conceptual art recasts the artist in the role of the thinker. It identifies him as an intellectual and not a tradesman. It renders viewers rather helpless by means of mystification and obscurantism. It discourages any questions as to meaning and dodges questions of morality.
What has thus been lost by modern art, removing itself from representation and narrative, is a tremendously rich history beginning with the earliest cave paintings.
This long tradition reminds us of how we evolved, with biology and culture fused.
We are the big brained hominid that beat all the others.
To survive, we needed to be able to notice little movements, small changes; we needed to recognise a multitude of objects outside ourselves. To work together as a social animal, we refined our body language, our speech and dress over hundreds of years. Our evolutionary development is reflected in film, photography, ballet and theatre. The refinement of this body language over thousands of years provides us with the potential to express so so much, with the merest nuance.
Recognition is the source of deep fundamental pleasure as well as necessary for survival. This is the strength that abstraction denied itself in the search for a release from the strictures of realism.
We sees faces and figures in inkblots. We interpret.
We love to see clearly, we love exactitude. We seek to define the indefinable. We coin a defining phrase for it: “Je ne sais quoi”
The frustration of these inbuilt desires and needs is the mainstay of modern art. Post modernists consider themselves to be higher beings who can endure endless ambiguity and indeterminacy. and who can be properly grown up and go without closure.
What happens if the artist has the courage to ignore fashion and seek meaning through straightforward painting?
In this serious and dedicated engagement with the figurative tradition, Lettie works to articulate her own perceptions and experiences, but not as a form of desiccated individualism. She winnows out her own insights bringing them forth with a hard won lucidity.
Her portraits invite empathy and compassion, analysis and careful thought as we study each unique psyche as it is bodied forth in the portrait.
We are aware from subtle hints of the complex societal mesh of which they are a part. They speak to us as human beings. In South Africa that means a great deal after all the destruction we have suffered.