ART: We Regret to Inform You…
Review by DAVE MANN
Between my finger and my thumb
Seamus Heaney
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
There are tears by the time Wezile Harmans finishes his performance. Left in the room with the artist’s collection of envelopes and words, it takes a moment for the audience to gather themselves and go.
In Harmans’ solo exhibition at the National Arts Festival, the artist uses a singularly devastating sentence as a conceptual point of departure: We Regret to Inform You…
It’s a line known by dejected job applicants across the globe. In South Africa, where unemployment affects well over half of the population, work is always on our minds. How hard do we work, how well do we work, and how do we find and keep this work? It’s an essential part of our lives. For Harmans, the way we shape ourselves and our lives around work is inherently performative. There is a choreography to our labour, he posits, an inextricable link to the body, the spirit.
Harmans’ own performance activates We Regret to Inform You. As audiences filter into the room, we automatically gravitate towards the chairs and desks spread across the room. They’re like school desks, small and plain, and each of them is covered in a collage of envelopes bearing the exhibition’s name and central refrain, handwritten by the artist. A video work is projected onto one wall, showing his public performance outside the Iziko South African National Gallery.
In the centre of the space is where the artist takes his seat, an unravelled ream of fabric bundled up before him and reaching up to the ceiling. There is lightness and darkness. He is in the warm glow of the spotlight; then he is a fading silhouette. Intermittent percussion, like a clock ticking, measures out hours, days, and years – time passes, runs out.
The fabric, likely from his previous work in which he wrapped up and obscured his face, still bears these ghostly impressions. Even in its stillness, the material is stifling. Dust rises from it and dances in the light.
Harmans limits his choreography to the chair. He lies across it, sits backwards, and leans back precariously. Then he turns his attention to us, dragging desks and chairs to sit alongside or directly in front of audience members. Some meet his gaze; others busy themselves with the pens provided to them and join the artist in the ritual of writing, digging, and excavating.
In the video work, he is on his hands and knees in front of Iziko, scrawling endlessly on a 50m long paper – “we regret to inform you.” Is it repetition or a form of meditation? Bloody-mindedness or madness? Harmans’ work may have been informed by hopelessness, but it is not bound by it. Instead, he is interested in that which remains possible. It is the relentless act of writing and moving towards repair.
He gets up to leave, closing the door behind him. It’s a pointed and powerful moment. We are left with the work and its influence, its incredible possibility. In the centre of the room, the fabric again holds our attention, rising to the ceiling like a record of rejection or a palimpsest — a narrative waiting to be rewritten.
©2022 The Critter. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
