NIËL JONKER

November 23, 1993

Top Left NIEL JONKER the carppet heart, 1993 Top Right NIEL JONKER, the tar flag 1993. Bottom Left NIEL JONKER theplaster kidney, 1993 Bottom Right the rubber wig, 1993.

 

Niël Jonker, one of the founding members of the FLAT, mounted an exhibition of mixed media sculpture which included an impressive number of individual objects crafted with a variety of techniques. Using materials that ranged from cast road tar to kitsch carpeting, Jonker created a rich personal vocabulary of enigmatic three-dimensional visual symbols. Shirts cast in sand inside a lead covered suitcase, a rubber wig, a wax eye with images imprinted and a tar flag were but a few of the free standing and relief works that made up the exhibition.
Casting was an important process in Jonker’s work, and for these he used industrial materials to transform and re-present both hand modeled and found objects. The original reference remained recognizable and so was strongly linked to the source. The viewer could immediately recognize the loaded images - heart, eye, flag, suitcase, shirt etc… However, in choosing such evocative sensual materials to ‘render’ these familiar objects, Jonker opened up the possibilities of how material can also operate as poetic metaphor.
Notable in this presentation of works, also, was one that demonstrated a slight departure from the crafted sculptures that seemed to reference his more personal symbols and pointed to a self-conscious reference to kitsch ‘art objects’ of the region. Here he transformed a found copper‑clad curio mounting plate by fabricating a wax ‘horn’ that transformed into a tongue and rudely penetrated the viewer’s space. Usually adorned with an animal’s horn such as a rhino, these ‘African curios’ are familiar items in gift shops in South Africa and speak more to what is colonial than what is ‘African’. With this ‘copper‑based curio horn’, Jonker commented on how socio-political content is inscribed in even seemingly ‘innocent’ South African popular culture; how gift shop souvenirs reflect the lingering colonial past. There is something distinctly ironic about the in-authenticity of a stuffed animal trophy that has been ‘bought’. Through its displacement into a Fine Art context, its obvious reference is shifted and its covert meaning exposed.
Later that year, Jonker extended his explorations of transformation through casting, in an event that proved to be even more politically charged and potentially controversial. One evening, with Adrian Hermanides, Jonker set out to a take a plaster cast from the boot of the memorial statue of Louis Botha in the local park. When police come to question why such activity would be taking place in the middle of the night, the artists told the officers that they were from the parks department and were fixing the bronze statue in their overtime. The police believed the tale and as the story goes even offered to assist with bringing water. Jonker then made a wax boot cast from the mold made that evening. In a continued ‘dialogue’ with this same monument, Piers Mansfield returned to the statue some months later and painted that same boot pink.
The making of the ‘curio’ and the ‘interaction’ with the Botha statue were significant in that they operated through a change in context and spoke to images that were strongly associated with the colonial past. In a sense, Jonker’s curio and the interaction with the Botha statue were examples of ways in which we sought to offer a critical voice by using (and subverting) the very language of the thing being critiqued - in this case the collectable commodity and the heroic statuary. But were these just pranks? Were these acts readable enough to be communicative and therefore politically meaningful? These same questions would be asked; these same strategies revisited by many of us at the FLAT in the years to come.

Left NIEL JONKER the wax eye, 1993 Right NIEL JONKER the horn lounge curio, 1994