Welgemeend August Art Month - 2019

24 The ‘noises of modern warfare’ - far more devastating than anybody could have imagined - turned out to be everything but the art of noise. A little over two months after the three Futurists were in London, Britain had declared war on Germany. Russolo and Piatti, co-inventors of the Noise Intoners, named the orchestra instruments Buzzers, Exploders, Whistlers, Thunderers, Murmurers, Gurglers, Rattlers, Cracklers and Roarers, all very similar to the names of fireworks. Pinker explains: ‘The Futurists were anarchists in some respects. As a reference to their stance and volatile times in which the 1914 photograph was taken, there are explosions and fireworks scattered throughout the painting. A matchbox with three stars is in the foreground, as is a Roman candle, which is about to explode; in the landscape a bomb and other fireworks, all ignited, are ready to go off. As a reference to “tempo” in the title, a progression of postcard-size images of landscapes running from left to right at the top of the painting reflects the times of day - dawn, sunrise, early morning, continuing through into the night […]’ [Pinker and Stevenson 2004:74]. The expansive landscape below these “postcards” – most likely based on the artist’s observations of the land surrounding the town - is brooding, ominous, and suggestive of the atmosphere before a thunderstorm. The Futurists’ Intonarumori , even though it may have sounded like incomprehensible noise to music critics, echoed the unrest and disruption felt throughout Europe at the time – in fact, even echoed events in the then Union of South Africa where labour unrest in 1913 and 1914 led to violent crackdowns on protesters. In 1914 Britain was embroiled in unprecedented domestic upheaval. ‘The Left still calls it the Great Unrest – a period between 1910 and the outbreak of the First World War when workers, many organised for the first time in unions, began to flex their industrial muscle. This was an era of political radicalism, of demands for women’s suffrage and for poverty relief. In continental Europe, and especially in Russia, the old autocratic order was in peril from socialists, syndicalists, anarchists and Bolshevists […] There were strikes and disputes everywhere, from teachers and shopkeepers to bus drivers and the cotton mills. The most militant group were the coal miners who in 1914 were locked in a series of disputes with pit owners around the country. The Daily Telegraph reported how 100,000 men were idle in Yorkshire and the price of coal had risen to 5s a ton.’ [Philip Johnston, ‘Life on the eve of war: the workers unite’, The Telegraph , 1 August 2014, accessed online, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/ world-war-one/10990532/Life-on-the-eve-of- war-the-workers-unite.html]. Marinetti’s presence as an embodiment of revolutionary change is meaningful when seen against the backdrop of an armed struggle for political and economic liberation in South Africa. As Hayden Proud pointed out in 2004: ‘[Pinker’s] re-contextualised objects and subjects become the dramatis personae of his art. Populating and animating the shallow stage of his format, they become suspended in a pictorial realm of studied whimsy, interlocking and fusing to become potent metaphors. They become the players that chronicle and perform his tragicomedies of the colonial, and indeed the post-colonial, condition […] Collectively, especially in his later works, they create a peculiarly Pinkeresque pictorial noise and clutter, a Dadaist circus orchestrated by the artist.’ (Proud, in Pinker and Stevenson 2004: 9). Pinker’s compositional arrangement of his ‘pictorial noise and clutter’ in this painting warrants our attention. Pinker sets up a counter dynamic to the revolutionary forces represented by Marinetti and to the main fireworks display with its inherent incendiary potential. On the other end of the Karoo verandah we are alerted to potential energies of a wholly different nature, represented by inter alia the yin yang symbol (in the play of shadows on the plant pot) and the presence of a flaming salamander above it. Yin yang is a symbol for acceptance of universal dualities, the salamander refers to a belief that these lizard-like amphibians can withstand fire – in fact, could quench fire with its moist body. Will Marinetti’s Catherine wheel spin out of control into a destructive ball of fire, or could it be transformed into a yin yang duality? By giving such prominence to the spinning Catherine wheel – and the pair of women’s shoes balanced on top - Pinker may be offering a dark reference to the spiked wheel, the breaking wheel, on which the Christian martyr Catherine of Alexandria was tortured before being beheaded in 307AD. Out of little sketches and drawings Pinker made as he wandered through a charming, established town in the centre of an ancient flood plain, noticing the ephemeral play of light and shadow on the façades of the modest nineteenth-century houses, the artist’s aesthetic contemplation is turned to time, the time of day, the passing of time, tradition, revolution and change, the potential for chaos - and a consideration, perhaps, of his own ‘precarious position […] in a then-fractured, isolated and dangerous land’. [Proud in Pinker and Stevenson 2004:10]. He sets alight thoughts about revolutionary actions and how they fit in with – or oppose – ancient ideas of duality. He assembles on canvas a seemingly disparate cast of characters and concepts including Futurism,