Strauss & co - 17 February 2018, Cape Town

156 Strauss & co contemporary art auction (a diagrammatic representation of social strata, with the king at the apex and the people at the base, and the tiers of the church, the military and the bourgeoisie in between). The double of the five-face portrait is four dots and the double of the five-face portrait a five-pointed castle. I refer to these doubles as narrative description. I tried, in my own mind, to prepare the illustrations in a way that would appeal to a writer; the doubles were designed to prompt or provoke narratives The second set of illustrations, Roar , tries to imagine what the iconography of a pan- African religion might look like. There are four animals, all female: a lioness, a cow, an eagle, and a peahen. The land animals have three heads. Like the Silence! illustrations, they also have doubles. In this instance the doubles are all social pyramid diagrams in various colours. I tried to restrict the illustrations to singular images. There is no notion of a continuous narrative, as in Masaccio, here. The first image was started in 1996, The work proceeded by trial and error, and in the end the pieces had to serve various functions. The fact that they are meant to interest a writer as opposed to an artist has already been mentioned. The illustrations are also ultimately exhibition material. To distinguish between the illustrations as they exist on a computer screen or in a book, and the illustrations as they appear on exhibition, the technique of embossing was used. The reproductions do little justice to the highly glossy embossed images. The rather cumbersome and lengthy process of high relief embossing allowed for a kind of reward system for those who bother to attend the show. A set of 26 illustrations was handed over to the writer Ivan Vladislavic. As mentioned above, these illustrations represented found and sourced objects, artefacts, implements and ruins, and the writer was invited to play the role of historian, anthropologist or palaeontologist. I did not explain my intentions in producing the illustrations, merely the work process. He had to make sense of the illustrations on his own: my role as creator has come to an end. In much the same way that the makers and users of found and sourced artefacts and implements cannot make a miracle appearance to correct the narrative of the historian or anthropologist, I cannot make a “death-defying appearance’ in the context of this work. What I had anticipated would be a lengthy text at most, turned out to be a book, The Exploded View by Ivan Vladislavic. The book was published independently, outside the scope of this exhibition. A manuscript of the book was used in the selection of texts for the exhibition. The role of Andries Walter Oliphant, an academic and public intellectual, was in keeping with my work with Ivan Vladislavic. Oliphant’s job was to consider the illustrations and the book of fiction together, and decide subjectively which illustration had generated which portion of the text. The texts he selected are displayed together with the embossed illustrations of The Model Men . Vladislavic and Oliphant wrote about their experiences of this project in separate essays included in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition that was mounted at the Wits Art Galleries in 2004. Joachim Schönfeldt ´ ´ ´ ´