Strauss & co - 17 February 2018, Cape Town

154 Strauss & co contemporary art auction Writers sometimes commission illustrations to accompany their texts. In The Model Men , the process was reversed: the illustrations were made first and then a writer was commissioned to write about them. This was done not merely to challenge a convention. The Model Men explores a specific working methodology that seems to be prevalent at the moment, which may be stated simply as “how to animate dumb objects’ Where text is absent, the history of (African) oral societies is constructed from found and sourced objects, artefacts, implements, ruins and so on.We have seen anthropologists and palaeontologists work with “dumb objects’ and put a universe to them. In my work I have tried to further the idea of objects as augmentation to speech, posing questions such as “In speech, when does a speaker revert to visuals?’ I have also looked at oral cultures, the charismatic speaker, and “priority perspectives’ – truth and what people want that truth to be. In the case of The Model Men , similar questions are explored in relation to illustrations as augmentation to written language. The 26 illustrations are divided into two parts. The first set Silence! , is an organogram of portraits. Frans Hals and Rembrandt painted such portraits, depicting the board of a poorhouse, for instance Silence! , in my own thinking, is a sort of organogram of trustees or patrons, or the board of a hospital, asylum or sports club, or the committee of a taxi association, or the leaders of a political party, or perhaps just the members of a crime syndicate. Five of the illustrations are portraits; the first shows one face, the second shows two faces, and so on. Each of the portraits has an additional illustration associated with it, which I refer to as a double. I paired the one- face portrait with a taxi (as an example of transport). The two-face portrait is paired with a typical matchbox township house (used here as an example of location). The double of the three-face portrait is a social pyramid 55 Joachim Schönfeldt SOUTH AFRICAN b1958 The Model Men 2000 - 2012 each signed and dated respectively in pencil in the margin 27 painted and embossed works on paper interleaved with acid-free paper in an artist- made corrugated cardboard box with a lid made from recycled material and band fastener 51 by 76,5cm each; the box measures 57,5 by 82,5 by 6cm R800 000 – 1 200 000 EXHIBITED Wits Art Galleries, Johannesburg, The Model Men , 24 August to 10 September 2004. LITERATURE Ivan Vladislavic. (2004) The Model Men , Johannesburg: Goldfields Press. ´