The art and science of making the world

Karel Nel has always been an artist’s artist. Though he seldom exhibits his work in gallery shows now, it is partly because he has become a sought-after curator, consultant and art historian in the years since leaving his long-term academic post at Wits, while continuing much of the work he was engaged in while there. This respect from his peers has come because his life’s work has been consistently rigorous in concept and execution, with a commitment to producing museum-quality work, whether these are observational pieces or large-scale abstract works.

This survey show, Close and Far, at his alma mater, Wits Art Museum (WAM), is brilliantly curated by outgoing curator and museum director Fiona Rankin-Smith. It works from the principle of association with the four of Nel’s works that are in the Wits Collection.

What Rankin-Smith does is to bring many loaned works — Nel’s work is extensively collected privately and by art institutions around the world — into dialogue with the Wits works. This provides a means of understanding the arc of Nel’s career not simply in terms of a shift in medium of subject matter, but as a series of conceptual shifts that have required a different approach to his art making.

Another truly remarkable aspect of the exhibition is the interaction between Nel’s artworks and objects from his extensive and exquisite private collection of African and Oceanic art and objects.

The captivating exhibition also foregrounds Nel’s lifelong fascination with scientific observation and meaning making. His long-standing role as artist-in-residence for the international Cosmic Evolutionary Survey (Cosmos) project — established to extensively observe, record and map a two-degree wide section of space below the Leo constellation — has produced a range of extraordinary works, which are highlighted in the exhibition.

As Nel puts it in his exhibition statement, “For me artmaking has always been a kind of reconnaissance, a means to explore and make sense of the world around me. Over many years, I have attempted to carefully document my ‘mind’s eye’ perceptions. The complex and often subtle interface of the inner and outer worlds has stimulated me to attempt to understand the primary mechanisms of perception — the inner vision from the mind’s eye and the outer world using the physical eye. Both art and science use visualisation and mental abstraction to grasp and theorise, and my interest in the relationship between art and science is connected to questioning the long-held view that they are radically different disciplines. Both question the nature of reality, and both have sometimes constructed remarkably similar views of the world. Much of my drawing and environmental artwork explores the external and internal phenomena we call reality, and, in my work, I draw both on artistic and scientific ways of making the world.” 

Nel goes on to link these artistic drivers in his work to the way in which he collects art and objects. His focus in this has been on objects that create value or meaning in societies, acting either as forms of currency in economic exchange, or as sacred objects in a religious exchange between the human and the divine. The juxtaposition of artworks and these collected works is a remarkable part of this exhibition.

The exhibition includes abstract works from the early 1980s, characterised as “mind’s eye drawings” that map mental states. One of the works in the Wits Collection, Reconciliation of the Opposites, is one of these. The works alternate between the highly abstract and the carefully observed world around the artist, in detailed still lives such as a lecture theatre at the Centre for Astrophysics in Paris, or the formal sand and rock garden at the Ryōan-ji temple in Japan. 

An interesting detour from these modes of working is a set of dust “landscapes”, which use site-specific materials to evoke, remember and commemorate critical moments in human thought and history. These works include Monument and Eleven, two works that — in the very dust that constitutes them — lead the viewer to reflect on the events of 9/11. 

The relationship with the Cosmos project has produced some amazing abstract works, which are also showcased. Nel’s bridging of artistic and scientific discourses and ways to make meaning of our lives is most poignant in these aesthetic glimpses into the matter of our universe. In conjunction with the sacred objects on exhibition used by ancient cultures to make sense of their own universe, it is powerful indeed.

Karel Nel’s Close and Far exhibition is on at Wits Art Museum until August 3

www.wits.ac.za/wam