The Brooklyn Rail

A major impetus in conceptual art since the 1960s has been ambitious exploration of our impact on the environment. Projects ranging from Robert Smithson’s massive Spiral Jetty (1970) earthwork to Richard Long’s ephemeral A Ten Mile Walk, England (1968) speak to our capacity to redefine the landscape through intentional aesthetic actions that imbue it with meaning. The immensity of their scale and immersive nature heighten our perception of the form a creative intervention may take. That sensibility is more intensely relevant than ever with global awareness of the need to redress behaviors responsible for climate change and anthropogenic degradation. In that context, the images most insistent in my consciousness are those manifest in open-air shelters and boulders of mountainous outcroppings seamlessly integrated into the southern and eastern African landscape. So vast is their presence that they have to date not been comprehensively mapped. Among the more well-known are Kondoa in Tanzania, Tsodilo Hills in Botswana, the Brandberg in Namibia, Cederberg and Drakensberg in South Africa, and the Matopo Hills of Zimbabwe.

Rock painting is a movement of unparalleled longevity and scope. As recently as the last century, its Khoisan practitioners selected each of these locales as integral to creative acts in which they applied natural organic matter to canvases of stone. Researchers have related its development to excavations at sites in South Africa that have uncovered prehistoric artist palettes in use as far back as 75,000 years ago. Exposed to the elements, the paintings are unavoidably vulnerable and especially impacted by moisture and fire. Those examples that survive in situ range in date from as many as 10,000 years ago at sites in Zimbabwe to the early twentieth century at other sites in South Africa. No true conservation method to prevent them from fading over time is likely to be developed. While recent protective measures of designating them cultural landmarks seeks to fix them in time, they are in essence a form of expression that is inexorably fading and that will someday simply disappear.

Outlined with delicacy and clarity in black charcoal and white clay, these polychrome representations are richly shaded with pigments that range from deep red to pale yellow. In many instances it is apparent that scenes were added to at a later time by different authors. The protagonists of this layered imaginary include humans, animals, and beings that fuse elements of both, engaged in complex densely packed compositions. The vast reservoir of fauna portrayed include many varieties of antelope, giraffe, rhino, elephant, zebra, warthog, reptiles, and fish.

Despite the grandeur of the locales in which these ghostly interventions are set, the imagery is of a subtle and intimate nature. Visiting them requires traveling great distances from the nearest regional capitals such as Bulawayo to rural areas, followed by arduous hikes. More often than not they are not situated on a marked trail or mapped with GPS coordinates. Even when following a guide well versed in finding them, so subtle is their presence blended into their natural surroundings that they are scarcely discernible until the viewer is positioned immediately before them. That placement within the landscape, exposure to changing light, and idiosyncrasies in the rock surface all intensify the visual experience and impact of the imagery.

These depictions constitute reflections relating to vast expanses of human experience. Given the indeterminacy of when the most layers were applied to what continue to be active points of reference in the lives of contemporary communities, the paintings lie between an ancient past and the current moment. Their succession of authors adapted to changes experienced over many different eras. The earliest practitioners sustained themselves by hunting and gathering the wild animals and plants that grew naturally as a part of their environs. On some levels they afford a record of observations of a world that today has been radically transformed. The earliest observations captured pictorially team with a superabundance of natural life. Over time, they have been subject to fundamental social realignments. Khoisan populations shifted to the domestication of animals and plants. In more recent centuries migrants and European settlers encroached upon their vast open spaces. It was however their tragic persecution as less-than-human by colonizers and their forced resettlement that ultimately extinguished this artistic tradition.

Counter to assumptions that one can interpret the meaning of these images intuitively, analysis of nineteenth and twentieth century sources devoted to Khoisan beliefs and religious practices has at once disabused us of that and afforded awareness of their complexity. The representations are not simply literal depictions or metaphors of the natural world. A scene of an elephant hunt is an event that would never have occurred in life. Instead, Khoisan beliefs recognize a force outside human beings that may be tapped while in a state of trance, induced by dance. The power of the largest, strongest, and most dangerous of beasts is channeled by the artist in trance. The artist’s visual creations are evocations of spiritual transcendence imbued with potency, a source to be ritually invoked. The painted surface may be conceived as a veil separating the artist from the spirit world.

While for the most part the original impetus for Khoisan artists’ selection of specific locales will forever remain unknown, it is evident that they were regularly revisited places that had spiritual resonance and meaning. Many of those that are today situated in landmarked cultural heritage zones continue to hold profound meaning to members of local communities who maintain ancestral associations and ritual connections to them. A prevailing philosophy is that too much outside access to this fragile legacy will hasten its disappearance. Whether one’s point of departure is a contemporary art capital of Johannesburg or New York, to engage with it requires considerable effort. This great art is not an experience of museums, galleries, or kunsthalles, but rather of plein air discovery following lengthy journeys to sites that are exposed and yet difficult to access. Most of our contemporary engagement with art takes place in choreographed settings: leaping beyond these in order to experience full integration of natural wonder and human artistic ingenuity offers an incalculable reward.