Garth Erasmus - Arc of Testimony

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John Doe

bio
Garth Erasmus was born in Uitenhage in 1956.

His career has included:
• teaching
• holding workshops
• participating in residencies
• exhibiting artworks and giving performances

Garth has been involved with various cultural institutions at an organisational level.



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Garth Erasmus and the Arc of Testimony: a crossover of creative disciplines

mandy conidaris


Garth Erasmus is a musician and visual artist whose creative work concerns his Khoisan heritage. In 2005, Garth described the creative trigger behind this series of prints:
Arc of Testimony is a series of 9 silkscreen prints that deals with personal iconography and contains the image of the Khoisan musical bow as its central symbol. For 20 years now I have been playing the bow as an integral part of my music-making activities, and for the last 5 years I have been part of the performance group the Khoi Khonnexion. It is an instrument that I have researched extensively and built myself, and it has become an important metaphor in my work for my personal reclamation of ancestral heritage and roots. Growing up in apartheid South Africa, this aspect of community life has been severely damaged or simply neglected in the face of the more pressing priority of anti-apartheid struggle.

These images developed over a number of years and come out of my experiences of playing the bow, and also the experience of teaching and explaining the playing techniques in mostly workshop situations. The arc of the title refers to the actual physical arc-like shape of the bow itself, and testimony refers to the poetic texts that have been worked into the images. The texts, which come from a separate body of work, references aspects of South African historical facts/events as well as personal poetic inspiration. 


In the early 2000s, Malcolm Christian established The Caversham Centre for Artists and Writers (CCAW). This organisation, linked to the original Caversham Press, provided the formal administrative structure necessary to enable the hosting of international residencies.

The poem and images from Garth Erasmus’s Arc of Testimony resulted from E-POS, a collaborative residency intended to build creative dialogue between artists and writers. This was held simultaneously at CCAW and at the Frans Masereel Centre, in Kasterlee, Belgium, over a three-week period in November 2003. At the time, Veerle Rooms, project facilitator/coordinator, in the introduction to the residency’s e-pos gazette, described the beginnings of this residency, and the ideas around its purpose:

All stories start with what preceded. Previous contacts, a phone call, an email. Numerous phone calls, several emails. In Afrikaans they are called e-pos: electronic announcements. They grew into a ‘personal vocabulary’. The title was waiting in the subconscious. The Epos, the Story according to Dutch understanding, was already embryonic. The new story still had to arise; but everybody had this embryo in mind from the first personal contacts on. It became immediately clear that everybody would tell his own story: the writers by the word, the visual artists by their own visual language.

Garth worked at Caversham with the writer, poet and cultural philosopher Frans Boenders and artist Linda Vinck, both from Belgium, as well as the Cape Town-based writer Mavis Smallberg. While the crucible of Caversham contained these four, a small explosion of creative activity occurred. Frans, who worked often in collaboration with visual artists, wrote Garth’s Novene while in the Netherlands, and it forms the frontispage of the Arc of Testimony print portfolio. Here is a translation:


Garth’s Novene
1
he fathers her as she does father him
they play the bow in the calabash
2
poorly one-sided arm
moenie skaam wees nie
3
Witness relines on the bow
Like an arrow in the boat
4
Screaming pig at the window
Moon not shedding light in the dark
5
apostles in numbers extant
with invocations pregnant
6
The mistress of the whitish bull divine
Feasts on blood river water like wine
7
hollow head speechless bearing
Witness black and double bow
8
one-fold manikin
Dreaming of an extra heart
9
Henceforth to sing I’ll use your mouth
Together we carry the sun around

Mavis, a teacher, started writing in the 1980s influenced by the injustices of the apartheid system. Her writing was particularly directed towards children. She joined the first non-racial teacher’s union in South Africa, and this organisation offered workshops in consciousness-raising by poetry performance. During the residency experience Mavis wrote the following about her exchanges with Garth:

Testimony to soul’s song
I hear the bow’s strings
in heart’s breath

the mystery of collective memory
trance-scending time

melody of rock scratch
and mantis flight
sand   wind   and   stars

testimony to soul’s song
youinme
meinyou
dancing with time


source
catalogue: e-pos Gazette. Published by Studio-Artist-Printmaker in an edition of 35.
Compiled by Suzanne Binnemans, Ivan Durt, Veerle Rooms and Malcolm Christian.
Translated by Katlijn van Acker.

in conversation
This is an excerpt from an interview sourced from the website below. This section of the extensive interview relates to Garth’s views on his own creative activity, personal history and culture, and the inherent link between the imagery of his drawings and his music making.
Demystifying Art: Garth Erasmus interviewed by Mario Pissarra.

© Mario Pissarra, 24/04/2006


There's also Garth the musician. How does that interface with Garth the painter? Are they two separate activities or do they come together in your paintings? Is there an overlap or is music an accompaniment at an exhibition opening? What is the interface, what is the relationship?
I'm actually very much still working on what it means in my life. My vision and aim is for all these activities to eventually merge. I'm working towards that. It is what I'm doing. The music is not a separate part from my interest in art in general because my interest in music came as a result of a purely art activity in the mid-80s. But also it's not just as simple as that. It was going together with investigating myself in a very personal way and trying to come to terms with what my own voice is. I think that that eternal dilemma that artists are looking for in their lives is something that happened to me. This whole aspect of thinking about my roots and my family life is closely wound up with the meaning of life lived in an apartheid situation. [For] me as a young person in the 80s, when I had these thoughts I had to put it into practice in some way. One of those ways was to look at what 'indigenous' means in my life.

At the time there was no talk about these kinds of things, but it was because of my particular upbringing again that this came up, and I used this as a way of navigating these heavy political issues about social engineering, where we come from etc, because I grew up in a family where there was a lot of storytelling and stories particularly about ancestors, [my] great, great, great grandmother for example, stories about who she was, aspects of her life, where she came from, as an example. So I always [was] fascinated by this in my life because as I was maturing I realised that this was not a common experience for a lot of people and so I took it very seriously from that point of view. I realized that there was something special in my life that I could actually build all my work on. I took this aspect of indigenous and what it means seriously in the mid-80s and started looking and reading and researching indigenous culture, particularly San culture, Khoi culture, looking at words like "Hottentot", the one word that I grew up with.

I was able now in my mature years to start looking at these things from an intelligent kind of point of view, reading researching and so on and it was within this research that I came across very accidentally, very spontaneously, examples of the music of indigenous cultures. It struck me when I came across this that I was not aware that our indigenous cultures were so rich in music. When I turned to further research and actually went to look at what these instruments of music, what they looked like as physical objects they were very influential and inspirational for me. I thrived simply their three-dimensionality, and because the way I received them at that stage was in a museum kind of context, in a context where I was still separated from this, I used this separation as a metaphor of doing something about them in my work.

So I did a very simple thing. I had no idea what these musical instruments sounded like, but I had a clear idea of what they looked like. So I simply had to use my initiative and build something similar and find out what the music was. The music basically came as a secondary thing after the construction of these objects because when I think back now I was wanting to create these as three dimensional objects, as sculptures basically, and I was intending to use them as sculptures in my work. That was the original intention except when I made them the sound became much more interesting for me and it kind of took over to the point where I don't see them as objects now, I see them as music making instruments, whereby actually creating the music that is within me... This is the fascinating thing for me because the music that I make is the same as the paintings that I make. I take it as the same... they're coming from the same source, the same spiritual and emotional place. This is why I say all of these aspects are equal in my life which is why I want to work towards bringing all of them together. I just haven't had that opportunity yet.
I also wondered whether for you there were analogies between say the line in one of your paintings and a particular sound, whether you intuitively... as I understand it, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't think you've got a classical background in music?
No [Laughs]
Do you on an intuitive level associate certain lines, certain colours with certain sounds in music, certain tones?
No, not really but I'll tell you an interesting thing. Immediately after I began playing instruments and these instruments range from string instruments to percussion instruments to wind instruments, I realized shortly afterwards when I started playing them that I had to create a certain kind of language for these instruments because I intended to play them in certain situations. I realised that I had to have a language that I could call on. What I did was I created my own way of notation. I don't think I would be able to explain it to you, because it’s very intuitive. Its simple things like on the string instruments... I would be drawing the string on paper and it would almost be like a visual image of how that played rather than a mind or intellectual image like a mathematical image, which is what musical notation looks like in the classical sense. So these were almost pictograms or pictures. For me this was how the language was working, and so this did influence me because I was playing and writing and notating my own music so often that it was becoming my own personal language and I felt free to use this in the other mediums that I was working on, my painting and my drawing. I found myself actually calling upon this reservoir of icons that were developing as musical notation, so from that point of view there is a link but not from the associative angle with colours meaning certain sounds or anything like that, not at all.