Seven contemplations on Babel

Miranthe Staden Garbett
November 2023

Contemplation 1: Out of nowhere, the mind comes forth

Once upon a time, in a latter-day Babel, an artist created her own genesis story; offering an original response to the kōan-type riddle of how existence came into being. The Seven Sisters installation is Barbara Wildenboer’s version of Genesis, her vision of beginnings. In a tongue of her own invention, she conveys the sensation of that latent moment, when out of nowhere and nothing, consciousness came forth. For prima materia, she convened seven books that explain some of the old stories about origins and how we got here. This genesis story, as is often the case with myths, calendars, maps and monuments, is built upon seven previous versions. These books, amongst them two the Bible and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, were powerful towers, broadcasting over space and time, in different languages, their particular worldviews. Religion and Philosophy; Academia, Science and Biology; Archaeology and Palaeontology – those pillars of Western civilisation; idols with feet of clay. With her scissors, the artist has cut through the dense and claustrophobic treatises, rendering the cacophony of Ages mute.

The dogma days are over. She does not get bogged down in those established tales that begin with hubris, mistakes, curses, exile, and end in desolation and disconnection. She sidesteps the swamp infested struggle for survival, ignoring what the delegation of experts have had to say on behalf of the ancient rocks, ruins and fossilised bones. They have not been summoned here for debate. The artist’s treasure is not the letter of their laws, but the genius of her own intuition.

She has convened these ‘cultic’ traditions’, upon which different empires and kingdoms have been built, with a higher purpose. This Babel is an exercise in unification, offering a language of coherence, harmony and delight to the scattered and squabbling tribes. In this Genesis template, they cease to be at odds with one another. Instead, like chicks cracking out of their shells, their flickering tongues chirp in unison, with little concern for the ink on the page. This genesis babbles in a bristling new born language. It is entirely original. Don’t try to figure it out. Leave your knowledge-baggage behind at the threshold. Approach it barefoot, with a beginner’s mind.

This genesis does not begin with a bang. It starts softly, imperceptibly, like a breeze. Starlight kissing the dark night; a kiss that splits the world in half. Inhale. The scent of petrichor perhaps, accompanies the pitter-patter of the first raindrops, of the very first spring. A frisson of anticipation, then a quiver. The sound of fireflies flickering and butterflies stirring in the solar plexus. Seven star-sisters twinkling, almond-shaped eyes waking, lashes a-flutter, blinking, opening sesame seeds. Seven books like seven birds, pages spread open like wings across seven Orion® screens. An animated time lapse video shows the pages being snipped into feathery filaments, blown by an invisible breath. The template shapeshifts, holding potential for several archetypal forms: seven decks of cards shuffled by invisible hands; seven mandorla eyes about to see, seven Easter eggs, seven cowrie shell vulvas, wombs on the verge of giving birth to the whole of creation. Exhale.

The Seven Sisters installation takes its name from the Australian Aboriginal creation myth. Their genesis is called The Dreaming; a cosmic beginning marked in the sky by seven sister stars, also known as the Pleiades constellation. These same seven sisters are ubiquitous in creation myths, and have been known by different names since the dawn of history. In Japan they are called subaru meaning unity; in Polynesia matariki, meaning eyes of god. According to a Polynesian legend, the Pleiades was once a single star: the brightest in the sky. It was smashed to pieces by the god Tane as punishment for its vanity. While The Dreaming is possibly the most ancient creation myth known to date, it is important to understand that it is not something bound to the past. In that genesis, as in this one, time is a circle not a line. The dreaming of life into being is always now.

Contemplation 2: Stairways to Heaven

-when no one is looking, and I want to kiss God, I just lift my own hand to my mouth –

The original tower of Babel was conceived as a literal stairway to heaven. Think of it as a man-made ladder to the stars, with which men could ascend to knock on heaven’s door or, or more likely, shake at God’s gate – the words Babel in Hebrew, and Bāb-ilim in Akkadian mean God’s Gate. Built on a plain with baked red bricks and sticky black bitumen, this ziggurat was made using advanced technology. The builders of Babel did not suffer from a lack of knowledge. It was wisdom and understanding that was lacking. This doomed temple was built, proverbially, on sand, instead of solid rock. This temple-building fiasco was a profane event – profane being a word that literally means “outside the temple”. By all accounts it was a self-serving exercise in vaulting ambition; built by men with the aim of making “a name for themselves”.

Babel also means mayhem and confusion. The original Babylon may have been geographically situated in the Middle East, in modern day Iraq or Syria, but metaphorically it describes a corrupt and rotten system. It has taken on mythological proportions as a cautionary tale, by those seeking to call out a materialistic civilization, marked by an excess of knowledge and lack of wisdom. The spirit of Babel is not bound to a time or place. The increasingly overarching domain of AI may well be the latest manifestation of the tower of Babel myth. It is not hard to see the World Wide Web as a hybrid temple/marketplace, and detect the fanatical worship of cyber gods everywhere.

While this type of temple is ubiquitous in Babylon, it is not the only temple template. History has witnessed numerous spectacular temple-building projects. In England they built Stonehenge, a temple made from standing stones arranged in circles. In India and Ethiopia, temples like Kailasa and Lalibela were carved out of rock and the earth itself. The earliest Greek temples originated in sacred groves in forests. There have always been wiser, more soulful, less literal, ways to build a temple. For example, a temple can simply be a circle drawn in the sand.

The Sufi poet, Hafez famously did this. He simply entered a circle that he drew on the ground. There in the centre he sat with God, his beloved friend. After 40 days of doing nothing but this, he stepped out of the circle, filled with bliss, transformed from the inside out. After this he wrote mystical things like “when I want to kiss God I just lift my own hand to my mouth”. The artist’s devotional intention similarly sets aside a space for wonder and deep contemplation. The result is Babel, the artist’s latest body of work, which in the spring of 2023, will be gathered under one roof, in a dedicated space of contemplation. However, this Babel is a temporary temple, a moveable feast. It follows the artist wherever she goes, an internal flame. – My mind is fire. My soul is fire – The true artist is one who discovers she has her own treasure house within.

Contemplation 3: Snakes and Ladders

– I came into being as I came into being, I grew as I grew – I changed as I changed –

The urge to grow is an electro-magnetic force of nature felt and shared by all living things. The artist has captured these invisible forces at play in Creation with high fidelity. The lively spirit of evolution is fully present in Babel. As in nature, everything here is held together by a vertical axis, whether overtly or implied in the totemic poles of the towers, spines and spires. There at the still centre of the turning world is an invisible needle around which all life spirals and twirls, spinning its silky thread; spreading its Kirlian filaments and wisps in ever outreaching fractal feelers.

As the column that connects heaven and earth, this axis is worthy of contemplation. The artist has been working with this archetypal shape of late. It forms a powerful yang counterpart to the yin that underpins the artist’s sense of aesthetic and process of intuition. -Clouds follow dragons, Winds follows tigers-. Babel is a successful balancing act of yang and yin, dragons and tigers, snakes and ladders.

The totem and wands are relatively new developments in the artist’s oeuvre, but the open books and title spines have always featured, simulating the Axis Mundi and other fundamental archetypes. The artist’s signature style is a unique expression of nature’s growth code; her own golden ratio. The feminine vesica pisces also features, resembling a cowrie shell or almond nut – two halves, with a line down the middle. This is evolution as art, as a vibrant dance of life, not a struggle for survival. These objects and artefacts are nervous creatures, absorbing and releasing energy in flowing streams, the same way rivers, trees and bodies do. The bristling energy, arising in stars and galaxies, rhizomes and bones, shoots and roots is revealed here. Creativity is an endlessly renewable energy, which the artist not only seeks to make visible, but also sources liberally.

Contemplation 4: Language of the Birds

– I flew straight out of heaven, a mad bird full of secrets-

The birds have many secrets to teach us about evolution. They are after all masters of ascension and adaptation. They are the dinosaurs that made it out of that extinction event alive. There’s a reason the mythical phoenix, symbol of rebirth, takes the form of a bird. Evolution however, might only be half of the story. Sufi wisdom teaches that life is not a one-way path, rather all things reach out to one another and are connected from highest to lowest, connected to what is moving toward them.

Involution is the flip side of evolution. The Sanskrit terms Pravrtii and Nivrtti translate as “coming forth” and “returning”. Involution comes closer to describing the inner evolution of the mind, soul and heart. For the Kabbalists, the true self lies within, a “point in the heart”. From this centre, a desire for reunion attracts us upward, to a realm beyond this world. Birds have also been used to symbolise involution, the process by which the Divine manifests in the cosmos. One of the most well known symbols for the descent of spirit into matter is a bird; the diving dove represents the holy spirit plunging into human consciousness.

To get to deeper truths, we must learn the language of the birds, which is a language of symbolism, beyond words. This concept has long been associated with attaining psychic vision and wisdom, and is found in some form or other in most world mythologies. Wise kings, prophets, saints and sages know about the language of the birds. In the ancient Egyptian Mystery Schools, the soul is conceived of in two parts: Ka and Ba. The Ba, which is the part of the soul that makes a person unique, is depicted with wings and a falcon’s head.

If you want to know what’s in the artist’s head, soul and heart, look into her art. Take, for instance, the series of seven small strange masked birds with wild electrical plumage. Its title The Conference of the Birds is a homage to a 12th century poem written by the Sufi mystic Farid ud-Din Attar. According to Hafez, Attar “traveled all seven cities of love”. For the Sufis mystics, the relationship between the Creator and all of Creation is one infused and suffused with Love. As devotees and students of Love, the Sufis have more words for love than any other religion. In the words of Rumi,”one can discuss it forever and never exhaust it.” The Conference of the Birds is a fable written about the journey of a group of birds in search of a king, called the Simorgh. Its deeper meaning points to the human search for self. 

There are seven valleys that the birds must cross on their journey to find the legendary bird-king. I noticed that the first three stages correlate with the artist’s journey. It begins in the Valley of Quest, with the understanding that “only the journey matters – all worldly powers and material possessions are of secondary importance”. Enormous commitment is required to get through the second Valley of Love, a heart-centred realm, where the logical mind is of no consequence. In the Valley of Knowledge it is understood that no two journeys are the same. Here, where all worldly knowledge fails, the seeker must find their own truth and individual insight. The journey becomes less arduous when you realise that “What you seek is seeking you” – which is both the riddle and the moral of The Conference of the Birds.

This seven-levelled quest from the egoic self to the complete self is also described in the Quran. These seven stages of spiritual evolution are known as Nafs, a kind of Piaget for mystics. The first self is tyrannical and controlling; the second, regretful and blaming; the third inspired; the fourth is centred and serene; the fifth grateful and content; the sixth is devoted to worship, service and prayer. Only at the 7th level does one  arrive at the true self, also called the pure or complete self.

These ideas are not unique to the Sufi traditions, there are parallels to this idea of spiritual evolution in every wisdom tradition. For example, in Judaic Kabbalah, this state is called “the attainment of adhesion with the Creator” and it is considered the purpose of life and our reason for being. Only this relationship of mutual love can fuse the scattered fragments back into oneness.

A multitude of voices, stories and languages, but on closer inspection the message is the same. Being on the human journey is a multi-layered mystery. Knowledge of this is key to self mastery; the only mastery necessary.

Contemplation 5: The gold we seek is within

Babel is an alchemical transmission. The artist’s most monochrome body of work to date, these offerings are mostly made in black, white and shades of grey. Black void and mud, white bone and cloud, grey ash and lead. The artist has added silver, gold and red only very sparingly.

This black, white and red colour palette mirrors the three phases of the Great Work of alchemy. Referred to by their colour, they are Nigredo (black phase), Albedo (white phase) and Rubedo (red phase). Alchemy was revived in the Renaissance from ancient Greek or Egyptian sources, and had as much to do with spirituality as with chemistry. Taken literally, it is the process of turning lead into gold. Lead is a base metal; the heaviest naturally occurring element on earth, as well as the softest. It dulls and tarnishes when exposed to air. Gold on the other hand does not perish, rust or decay. Its appearance doesn’t change. It stands the tests of time. It is a natural symbol for the soul’s radiance and immortality.

Another alchemical symbol for the soul is a star. Consider how stars start in dark nebulae (Stage 1) and end in a luminous stellar explosion (Stage 7). In between, accretion is the process by which super massive stars like our sun form. Yet, another example of Creation pulling itself together. In alchemy, sun and moon are pulled together too. The chymical wedding of Luna and Sol creates a third entity; a perfectly balanced hermaphrodite being; the divine human being, also known as the philosopher’s stone.

The higher aim of the alchemical arts is transformation, healing, union and wisdom. Because humans need wisdom more than gold. Wisdom discerned from knowledge, is as gold is to lead. The artist’s discretion guides her process. For her, this is healing work, this attempt to unify the scattered pieces. But it is also healing for the receiver, this evidence of the power of intuition, imagination and devotion. These days we don’t talk/know enough about the healing power of art as contemplation.

We can start with the art of a woman called Enheduanna. The first recorded author. Maybe you, like I, did not know about Enheduanna until now. The poetry carried by the Exaltation to Innana ‘word wands’ is Enheduanna’s. It is a testimony to her alchemical journey. It is a praise poem/hymn, also known as Lady of All the Me’s, addressed to the goddess Innana (Ishtar/Astarte/Aphrodite), guardian of the seven powers or “me’s. Here’s the story behind the epic poem, that the artist has reconstructed letter for letter in seven vertical word wands.

Enheduanna was an Akkadian princess and high priestess. As the high priestess of the ziggurat temple in Babylon, she is thought to have brought unity and harmony to her father, King Sargon’s divided land. She reached the heights within her father’s domain, before life took a turn for the worse. In this poem she writes in the first person, about her sense of inadequacy, about being driven from her sanctuary by a usurper (her cousin), and the abuse she suffered at his hands. Once a renowned beauty, her features turned to dust. She is forced to walk among the brambles, stripped of her ornaments and given a dagger with which to kill herself. However, her crisis becomes a turning point. In this case, a re-turning to the Mother, the divine feminine. Her father’s chief deity, Nanna the Moon God, was unable to assist. Only the Goddess Innana could save her. This goddess with seven divine powers, was not only seen as the creator Queen of Heaven, she also needed to be a warrior. It is a story of death, revolution, rebirth and restoration.

Alchemical transformation is not, at first, a pretty sight. The ruby light only dawns much later. It starts at rock bottom, in the mud, in the darkest parts. There is much confusion and illusion to get through first. 

Contemplation 6: Writing on the Wall

The story of the writing on the wall is another version of Babel, where human hubris and arrogance leads to a lesson in humility. This time the offenders are identified as Nebuchadnezzar II and his son Belshazzar. Their desecration of Solomon’s Temple results in a cryptic warning written on a wall: “God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; you have been weighed … and found wanting”.

Unlike those other temple raiders, the artist is not interested in loot and desecration; nor motivated by greed, power, glory or fortune. She ‘loots’ the tombs and temples of mediated history, looking for a way to retrieve a sense of wonder and return sanctity to the sacred. Her writings on the wall are not warnings but reminders.

Genesis, Proverbs, Revelation is a triptych in which these parts of the bible have been transformed and linked together to form a strange new beast – or at least its post-apocalyptic garments. Wild, protective and liberating. The pages now cascade like waterfalls or archangel wings.

It is always darkest just before dawn. The nigredo of the dark night of the soul happens micro- and macro-cosmically. We are still in the aftermath of the original Babel, scattered, polarised tribes wandering under a cloud of unknowing. It is easy to feel lost, bewildered and confused. The towers in Babylon may glitter like gold, but we have been warned against those illusions and tricks of the eye. Instead, to navigate the maze, the artist makes a space within.

The whole of Babel has been hand-made by one woman! With the exception of The Seven Sisters, all the other artworks are visceral, physical objects, built with painstaking attention to detail, letter for letter, page for page, with all the qualities of a sacred ritual. This Babel is not a desecration, or a bad translation, it is a labour of love and devotion worthy of contemplation.

Contemplation 7: Pearl Diving

– the cobra wakes and spits in my eyes, I rise through ochre smoke into black air enclosed in a shower of stars. –

From the oceans of knowledge – contained in all the libraries of Babel – the deep-sea diver emerges with her pearls. From the “leagues of senseless cacophony” she has plucked a few lines of poetry. With serpentine wisdom, the artist discerns her treasure; spelling it out in seven gold-lettered Translations/Incantations. Sometimes sentences are better ladders to the stars. Some are truth spitting cobras. Only a few worth reviving, safe-guarding.

Because in Babel, we know too little of the sacred, she chose sacred wisdom from ancient Egypt (The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Hermes’ Emerald Tablet), Mesopotamia and Babylonia (Enheduanna’s Exaltation of Innana), Persia (Sufi Rubaiyats and Divans of Attar, Rumi and Hafez), India (Bhagahvad Gita) and China (I Ching oracle) to keep intact. Her pearls are mystical truths from ecstatic poetry and the sacred texts of mystery schools; messages from time-travelling priestesses and whirling dervishes.

Because in Babel the people perish, not for lack of knowledge, but lack of wisdom, the artist shares her wisdom, her vision and her quest. This is her testimony to how “all things move with bliss toward their completion”.

This finds expression in the recurring number seven, the number of completion. 2023 is a year that numerologically adds up to seven. Seven starry eyed sisters, seven wise serpents, seven bizarre birds, seven terraced towers, seven word wands. Across multiple fields and disciplines, seven stages mark the journey to wholeness. In Babel different languages disguise and conceal the remarkable underlying similarities. Contemplation number seven is on completion. The artist has come full circle. The snake eats its own tail. After the end, another beginning, and the spiral of creation begins anew.

NOTES: The artworks under contemplation

Contemplation 1: Out of nowhere, the mind comes forth  – The Seven Sisters

Contemplation 2: Stairways to Heaven – Incantations/Translations; Exaltation of Innana

Contemplation 3: Snakes and Ladders – All

Contemplation 4: Language of the birds – The Conference of the Birds

Contemplation 5: The gold we seek is within –Disjected membra; Exaltation of Innana

Contemplation 6: Writing on the wall – Disjected membra; Genesis,Proverbs,Revelations

Contemplation 7: Pearl diving – Incantations/Translations, Exaltation of Innana

INTRODUCTION TO SUPER/NATURAL
Azu Nwagbogu

 

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5

 

SUPER/NATURAL by Barbara Wildenboer explores the boundaries of what is known and knowable about existence and reality by embracing not only art and science but also alternative phenomena which collude and collide under this subtext. Altered books are the primary motifs embodying not only the fundamental—and perennial—epistemological quest for validation as to the very possibility and meaning of knowledge but also the equally basic and unending ontological quest for validation as to the very possibility and meaning of existence. Wildenboer’s altered book creations surrender to the beauty of not needing the right scholarly answers, and creating one’s own links to fill-in the gaps. In SUPER/NATURAL, Wildenboer uses scientific texts that span from biology to astrology, physics to astronomy, alchemy to chemistry. Under Wildenboer’s dexterous care, H.G. Wells’ The Science of Life glides in a manner that the human body is only capable of while dreaming. Indeed, observing the work feels like an instance of jamais vu, a dream. You witness this for the first time but you have had this dream several times before because everyone dreams of flight.

The carefully amended pages criss-cross to form a light yet powerful wing skeleton, a metaphor for the transformative power of books to transport the reader to phantasmagoric dreamworlds. Wildenboer’s interventions may render her books unreadable in the traditional sense, but they introduce alternate knowledge systems that defy canon and welcome the artfulness of science. Through Wildenboer’s book modifications, she makes science visible in all its ungovernable, disobedient glory. The process of nullifying the printed text, creates space for new fields of erudition to emerge. SUPER/NATURAL is thus simultaneously a template for a new type of taxonomy about knowledge and existence, and an exhibition in which ontology-validating disciplines provide only a framework for new artistic structures to emerge.

To be useful, an investigation of this sort requires a reliable currency or medium of exchange. Photography is the ballast for SUPER/NATURAL. Through analogue and digital photographic processes she creates work that mostly consists of collage, photo and paper-construction and digitally animated collage works and book arts.

The old cliche, ‘books are magical’, comes to mind but with SUPER/NATURAL the remediation transcends and sublimates the reading process and the various pieces in the exhibition offer what can be known through a sort of panpsychism. Wildenboer’s history with photography is obvious in her current practice. At its core, photography proposes a search for truth and meaning, and ultimately reveals this exploration to be both futile and enlightening. Similarly with collage making, truth and meaning are revealed, not through accurate documentation of reality, but rather though intentional and accidental framing, flattening and juxtaposition. The physical sciences are principally focused on measurement and observation but the more intrinsic knowing is deeper and is qualitative.

It has been a decade since Wildenboer began working on Infinitesimally Small and Unimaginably Large, and this exploration has led to SUPER/NATURAL: a departure from scientific observation, measurement and all those vaunted political ontological promises of photography as a medium. She remediates, collages and, assembles, builds through her art and offers us work with feeling.

Imagine a camera shutter. It purports to allow light through so we obtain a measurement of the truth. It was Werner Heisenberg who espoused the Uncertainty Principle, a theory that on a subatomic level, makes known the impossibility of measuring displacement and position. Wildenboer does away with measurement and offers us the truth of her art in SUPER/NATURAL.

SUPER / NATURAL 

The text below is a condensed version of ‘A Strange Gaze: SUPER/NATURAL Unveiled’, a catalogue essay written by Miranthe Staden Garbett for Barbara Wildenboer’s (un)lucky 13ᵗʰ solo exhibition that was hosted by Everard Read in Cape Town in November 2020.

It is a game, an enigma for those who want to know. It is not to be understood and known—Mirra Alfassa

Meet SUPER/NATURAL. Born on 12 November 2020 at 6pm, in Cape Town, South Africa, under a sky of momentous planetary convergences. This moment of birth makes SUPER/NATURAL a Scorpio with a Libra moon. Her nature is otherworldly; her slightly spooky, bristling energy is magnetic. Wild at heart, but not crude, she could easily seduce you. She’ll transfix your gaze with her beauty. In the end, this miraculous entity intends to transform you. But not before she challenges you. You will be tested with an uncomfortable choice, intrigued by games, puzzled with maps, perplexed with contradictions. Her intricate complexities have been dissected and reconfigured with precision, according to the artist’s inner vision. Her delicate frame can barely contain the perfect storm that is at her core. Her pristine and polished veneer belies the chaos from which she emerges now, suspended in time, before the gaze of perfect strangers. I know all of this because I am not an impartial bystander at this birth. 

I am the wordsmith; the scribe recruited to witness, interpret and record the story of SUPER/NATURAL for posterity. I was in the background when the artist was in the throes of assembling her many bits and quarks, as she was forged Frankenstein-like from discarded parts into Art. I noted the twists and turns of their mutual evolution; an elegant whirlwind, but a whirlwind nonetheless. I saw how the artist both surrendered to, and drove the process, via a laser-beam stream of consciousness. I heard tell of the veritable army of collaborators on board; the many midwives assisting to bring the artist’s vision into being.

A force of nature, Wildenboer draws many into her spiral of creativity. She fits the description of a new breed of movers and shakers, called ‘glue people’, whose systemic view and natural empathy pulls synergistic teams together and challenges all involved by stretching their boundaries. In the build-up to this, her 13th solo exhibition, I gleaned a behind-the-scenes cast and crew of Little Prince-like characters and scenarios: a grieving daughter—the artist herself—alchemist/horologist/time-traveller/mapmaker, all rolled into one; a good father—whose blessings the daughter seeks, a man of scientific bent and the artist’s erstwhile biggest fan; then there’s the elusive Vedic astrologer appointed to confer a disarming charm and dignity upon the ceremony; the silversmith friend who turned a solid silver ring into numinous string, hardware into software; a threshold from one world to another, some stairways to heaven and up/down spiralling snakes…ascensions, descensions, and counter-revolutions; a daydreaming astronomer, conspicuously absent but for projections; constellations; clouds with silver linings; apparitions; a glimpse of hidden twins; some deadly sins; the wood of a kiaat tree; and a rather mysterious orchid, in lieu of the Little Prince’s Rose. 

On this quest, the artist took her usual hands-on approach, slashing through centuries of literature, shredding through stacks of printed media and ephemera, coaxing out compositions, layers of correspondences and threads of meaning. SUPER/NATURAL is the artist’s exploration of the contentious territory between what is seen and not seen, known and unknown. Both involve levels of nature. The supernatural also operates on ‘natural’ laws—it’s just that they are obscure and hidden from our normal gaze. It is in this invisible plasma, this liminal space, between solid rock and the hard place of fixed mathematical laws, that the supernatural bobs and weaves, nimbly evading detection, like a ninja shadow. 

Because she is often not what she appears to be, this text serves as a guide to reveal and suggest SUPER/NATURAL’s more obscure aspects to a stranger’s gaze. To be sure, supernatural has always been strange. An old French word with Latin roots, strange means ‘coming from the outside’ and implies something that is from elsewhere, foreign, unfamiliar, estranged, separated, not properly belonging, ‘Other’. Synonyms include curious, bizarre, weird and, funnily enough, the name Barbara. The artist’s own name means strange and otherworldly. Weird, isn’t it? In the same vein, the new science of quantum reality looks weird from where we stand. And while our scientific understanding of the supernatural is still evolving, in her current incarnation, SUPER/NATURAL is quantum. A walking talking contradiction. As quantum particles have the uncanny ability to appear in two places at once and influence each other half a universe apart, SUPER/NATURAL defies linear logic and proposes instead that we ponder on a paradox. With the flick of that forward slash, a gauntlet is thrown before us. 

The forward slash is a recurring ‘motif ’ in Wildenboer’s world. She uses this double-edged (s)word play to cleave two wor(l)ds together and apart: the ‘natural’ one, which presents itself ostensibly to our biological senses, and the ‘super’ world above it, which does not. The name SUPER/NATURAL is an ‘altered’ word that toggles with these entities, in a tango that takes two; showing us that a fight can be a celebration. Known/Noum. Karma/Kama. Two sides of the same coin. The question is: to flip or to conjoin? The forward slash fortunately provides options to play with, and can either signal a connection or a conflict between two things. Here it indicates both. And as a slash punctuates, binds and strikes the world of words, so does a cleaving device splice/slice worlds, through the very fabric of matter. Once again, this glue person’s medium is her message. Her other weapon of choice—a knife, a blade, scissors, keys, a slash, a stroke of luck. Like the slash, the verb to cleave has two very different meanings. Splitting something apart with a sharp instrument or the opposite—clinging, adhering firmly, sticking to something like glue. Etymologically, a cleave originally referred to an instrument for opening locks. From old spear, the words ‘keie’ and ‘ki’ refer to a tool to cleave or split with. A cleft is also a dent. A scar. A hollow. A gap. So, as you take that step across the threshold dividing the ordinary world from SUPER/NATURAL, mind the gap. 

I see SUPER/NATURAL as a precisely timed dance, a tango with chance, tightly calibrated chaos. Objects, imbued with scientific and sentimental import, are singled out for our consideration and the artist’s special attention. We leave familiar linear time and space behind as we depart from the first threshold, marked by seven Quanta clocks. These circular hand-cut maps have clock mechanisms that spin clockwise and anticlockwise simultaneously. The twist mimics how quanta dance. Likewise, the maps, reconfigured according to the alchemist’s secret recipe, no longer match up with any known territory. Their scrambled co-ordinates dismantle our bearings. In their altered states, they are now maps of nowhere familiar. Instead, like Alice’s rabbit hole, or Dorothy’s tornado, they present a portal to a stranger realm. 

In myth and story, as explained by Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, at the threshold between worlds, appointed guardians and monsters will try to stop you from starting your quest into the unknown. Scare tactics and intimidations are arranged to test the initiate’s courage and readiness for the journey beyond their comfort zone. Once you have passed through the Quanta portal, you will be faced with another doorway. This one has a conspicuously looming ladder propped up against it, and is mischievously titled Touch Wood. The ladder is easy enough to walk under. However, to pass through you’ll need to conquer or ignore/suppress/deny/dismiss any niggling superstitions. At this point, you may —or may not —experience some cognitive dissonance. 

This ‘booby trapped’ entrance is a nod to Dada, referenced throughout by the artist’s choice of material (found objects) and method (chance/intuition). It also invokes a prankster-style Fluxus intervention, designed to create an awkward or unpredictable experience, making you, the viewer, more aware that at this point you are exiting the ordinary world. The silver cord was once a ring. Now you’ll find it strung from rung to rung, along the centre of the ladder. This sliver of moonlight might pull your eyes up the ladder as you hasten past it. Or you may choose to linger longer under it. Those with serious reservations can avoid it altogether, though this will mean having to make a detour to use a back entrance. Either way, a choice must be made. SUPER/NATURAL is here to remind us that each choice determines a different destiny. 

This imposing ladder reminds us that our choices are usually underpinned by a belief system. At this second threshold, we are invited to ponder the quirks of our own belief systems in relation to the ‘quarkiness’ of the SUPER/NATURAL experience. She playfully demonstrates a variety of ways in which humans have felt compelled to understand, interpret, measure, control, capture, depict, fix and plunder her mysterious domains. Wildenboer has curated some choice examples of the tools humans have used to do this handiwork. We find numerous assisted ready-mades gathered here, found objects that the artist has altered. Familiar maps, books, texts, scientific devices, contraptions and occult apparatus have been appropriated, recycled, refurbished and repurposed according to the artist’s vision. 

Once you have passed under the ladder you will be faced with divergent paths. Whichever direction you are pulled in, try not to end up back at square one. Will you veer to the left first? Where the secrets of Psyche nestle and the hanging gardens of Babel beckon us to play games of chance and solve visual riddles. Or will the safety of objects, of cold hard facts and instruments pull you toward the right? The artist’s trademark altered books function as narrative clues or subtitles accompanying the other works, referring to subject matter ranging from the history of X-rays, camera obscura, astronomy, physics and the science of life. Follow the clues. 

To the right you’ll find evidence of the intrepid scientist and bold pioneer. New modes of seeing exploded around the turn of the 19th century. The mirror visions of the camera obscura soon grabbed hold of the collective imagination. Wildenboer marks this moment out in time with a book entitled camera obscura that she turned into one. That moment when images were first alchemised in a dark box, when apparitions set the stage for a second world, a second life; the mass hallucination that is the sea us goldfish now swim in. What started with the photograph has evolved into the internet of things, an omnipresent hyper-reality, where simulated entities and CGI avatars, like Lil Miquela and her crew of hyper-animated influencers, pout and frolic, increasingly indistinguishable from real humans. 

The camera was not the only new kid on the block. Many more tools and devices, clocks, machines and lenses were invented by scientists—those wacky Victorian gentlemen with their imperial ambitions—who popularised practical tools that would exponentially extend the limits of our human vision. On display are a telescope and an altered book about X-ray photography. Square-shaped books implode into the Radiolarian-like forms typical of 19th century illustrations, exemplified by Ernst Haeckel, the evolutionary scientist/artist whose microscopic visions sparked the Art Nouveau style. Their swirls are mirrored to the left where the Kirlian whirlwinds of Moksha Patam and Psyche flutter and unfurl. 

The story of Phantasmagoria is best told by the artist in her own words. “My father was a man of science. A year and a half ago, I arrived home to find that a small white orchid in a pot had been delivered to my front door. It had a card that read ‘Sorry for your loss’. Nothing else. I asked around in my block of flats if anyone could possibly be the rightful recipient of the plant. It didn’t seem to be meant for anyone so I decided to keep it until someone claimed it. A week later my father had an unexpected stroke and a few days after that he passed away. It was as if the orchid had managed to find its way to me through some weird glitch in the timeline. A few months passed and I came across an old copy of Hildebrand’s Camera Obscura at a local market. This was a later copy, but the first edition was printed in 1839 (the same year Louis Daguerre revealed the secrets of making the daguerreotype to the world). I decided to convert the book into a pinhole camera and attempt to photograph the mysteriously gifted orchid in line with 19th century spirit photography” (Wildenboer, 2020). 

The outcome of this process is two complementary pieces, Phantasmagoria and Camera Obscura, a conversation between ghosts. While this piece is more personal, it is typical of Wildenboer’s endeavour to make a bridge with art. This one to reach across the chasm that separates ancestors from descendants, past from present. 

Wildenboer, renowned as a collage artist, would be easy to cast as the one who cuts. But she does something else that is entirely surprising. Out of her severing, shredding and splitting, this artful butcher literally spins the very ‘thread’ with which she will recreate another world. Out of the so-called junk and miscellany, she mystically and masterfully transmutes base material into a cornucopia of art, upcycling one man’s waste into another’s gold. She leaves traces of the original source by keeping the titles on the books and in each artwork’s name. But the rest she destroys, dismantles, unravels and rethreads, spinning, sticking and coiling entire new worlds into being, out of the tatters of the old. Her revived libraries mark out a space where different ideologies and paradigms float around in peaceful symbiosis, a place where our shared wonder can triumph over the divisions and diversions of belligerent belief. 

Thus, she succeeds in miraculously fusing the entire process into her art practice, a self-sufficient, self-contained system of creation. In an act of biomimicry, she mirrors the benevolent natural systems around us, in which rot turns to sprout and the oxygen we breathe is nothing other than the excrement of trees. As such, she becomes a conduit for synchronistic unfoldings. In creating SUPER/NATURAL, the artist is also recreating and reconfiguring herself, while broadly exploring themes of ideology, belief, superstition, predestination, intuition and ancestry. We are invited to gaze at this strangeness and consider the ways in which our own beliefs determine what is possible to know and experience.

Making peace with too much ‘stuff’ – Review in the September 2017 edition of Art Africa Magazine

 

The word “excess” best describes our contemporary life; our consumerist information driven society. Whether you are rich or poor it seems existence and identity is defined by the products you buy, or aspire to own. The internet, digital technology, has further amplified and mirrored this condition, facilitating non-stop consumption of images, ideas and information.

What can an artist do in the face of this excess? Organise it, of course. Make it more palatable and allow it to operate as a metaphor for other states. Or at least this is Barbara Wildenboer’s take in the exhibition, The Invisible Gardener, at Circa Cape Town. She literally evokes this condition of ‘excess’, through the series titled Residue and Excess. They are collaged works consisting of chaotic cacophonies of cut-outs of all kinds of objects and crumpled torn-off pages of texts. You could spend hours studying these works, identifying the ‘pieces’ Wildenboer has drawn together as she has so densely packed the cut-outs they form part of  singular ambiguous masses.  It would be overwhelming to view them had she not consolidated the pieces into a circular arrangement contained by a circular frame. In this way too she references the cyclical nature of consumption, its endless nature but as with almost all the work on the exhibition, alludes to mother nature.

Through the lens of art, popular culture, imagery, information and ephemera, comes to resemble a natural cycle. Wildenboer presents it as a fluid and complex process, though the end product looks resolved, clean and, most importantly organised. Art is thus an organising filter of sorts.

In the Residue and Excess series objects have been drawn into cycles of life and death as they are absorbed into every facet of our existence. They mirror it, compel it, allow us to feel perhaps as if we are in control through an accumulation of stuff. Control is exerted not via a resistance to collecting but through cataloguing principles.

Wildenboer hasn’t tipped a dustbin over and presented its contents, she has carefully ‘curated’ and composed the ‘excess’ – sorted it. She has not set out therefore to expose the ‘excess’ but make sense of it, which is more or less what we all attempt to do in different ways as a means of coping with the overwhelming feeling of chaos, loss of control, it may instill.

In Invisible Gardener Wildenboer she turns the ‘excess’ into objects, rather than allowing it to be a kind of formless and pervasive condition. She does this work from an artist’s perspective in that she turns an excess of information and images into a new object that is disconnected from its origins and perhaps becomes abstracted (in the process). Information, data, becomes art. A number of artists have been embracing this approach. Most recently in this gallery, Liberty Battson comes to mind with her slick representations of algorithms and web-searches.

As the title, the Invisible Gardener, suggests, Wildenboer ‘tames’ and crafts the chaotic information-cum-consumerist media monster via her ordering aesthetic like a gardener would manicure and calm vegetation. This is the role of the artist according to Plato’s notion of the “Craftsman/Demiurge who creates an ordered universe by creating a mathematical order from the pre-existing chaos”, according to Wildenboer’s artist statement. Ordering ‘the chaos’ via a visual format naturally evolves into an aesthetic conclusion, perhaps because beauty allows for a sense of pleasure that alleviates anxiety.

This sense of heightened beauty derived from a calculated form of ordering best manifests in the Exactitude in Science series, in which Wildenboer creates these furry or leafy ‘beings’ (they are more than designs) from found paper materials, perhaps representing all sorts of information about the world. The beings these paper ‘sculptures’ represent are foreign and unfamiliar but are not strange or monstrous due to them being pleasing to eye. They are pretty and intricate – you marvel at their design. They are so perfectly formed and balanced due to appearing as two symmetric halves that have duplicated, like a geometrical fractal design. Via this kind of precision and ordering Wildenboer mimics digital formatting though she works by hand – arriving at a real thing, using paper. The doubling that reoccurs in this series and others affirms the way that information, stuff, keeps duplicating and growing, like cells in the natural world. From this perspective, information becomes an intriguing life-form, derived from principals governing the natural world.

In the face of ‘excess’, a system of ordering kicks in that is not driven by humans but the universe where all chaos is subject to this cycle of turning matter into form.

This drive to make sense of the world is a human one too, that is perhaps best traced through words – which is the basis of Wildenboer’s material in the Human Nature series where she re-enacts the visual ordering of information via books, which she turns into sculptures and images and then back into objects. She does this by cutting up a book, and imposing a Rorschach-test type motif, echoing this impulse to extract information from an image, or using an image to relay information –   as a means of making sense of a chaotic world. As such she expands this drive to order the world through cataloguing and the arrangement of information as a mode that is reversed when trying to decipher human motivation and thought patterns. In other words the image is used to detect an inner state or behaviour in ordering or perceiving the outer world rather than simply digesting and processing information by detaching it from its origins or from the ‘facts’.

It is significant that these paper sculptures (she produces hanging works but they are sculptural) evoke the female anatomy; the genitals and reproductive organs, evoking creation. In this way image-making and the system of ordering the world, the design of our bodies all coalesce into a female-driven character. The female body retains its reproductive function, however, it becomes a metaphor for all forms of creation; from knowledge to art. She collapses the boundaries between fields of science, new-age beliefs, art, and biology.

Wildenboer may be processing and engaging with ‘excess’, however, ultimately she is not preoccupied with critique. This is fortunate to some degree as this would always be at odds with making objects or selling art in a commercial space. She is good at making beautiful things. In her hands ‘excess’ becomes a different sort of stuff, offering what seems to escape us in the real world – a form of transcendence, wonder and maybe some kind of metaphysical escape that pushes us deeper into the natural world rather than keeping us at a distance from it.

Corrigall is a South African-based commentator, consultant and curator. www.corrigall.org

 

 

Invisible, Intangible, Insensible: Barbara Wildenboer’s ‘The Invisible Gardener’ written for Artthrob by Amie Soudien for Artthrob on 1 June 2017.

 

Barbara Wildenboer’s second exhibition with Everard Read/CIRCA Cape Town, is dedicated to the invisible hand that guides nature, and the human hand that attempts to interpret it. At its heart, The Invisible Gardener is also a celebration of collage at luxurious scales. A microscopic image is scaled upwards, downwards and reintroduced into a variety of media whilst exploring a number of subject matters. Collages are photographed, cut up and collaged again, re-absorbed into Wildenboer’s visual language.

However, like the work itself, the environment of The Invisible Gardener is pristine. CIRCA Cape Town is laden with a heavy air of ‘Old World charm’, created by the building itself, and the gallery’s proximity to the V&A Waterfront, and its port. The work seems appropriately situated near an active port, and the atmosphere of ‘exploration’, with its connotations of scientific discovery. Such endeavors into the scientific realm have occupied generations of artists, notably Michaelis academic Fritha Langerman and abroad, Mark Dion. Wildenboer dips into these disciplines and employs their visual references for her own use, making distinct references to visual scientific aids used to ‘exhibit’ biological or psychological phenomena.Waste and abundance form the core components of the series Residue and Excess I-VI (2017). Pages from crumpled magazines and newspapers are photographed and meticulously placed amongst images of antlers, octopi tentacles, and cameras from advertisements. From a distance, their individual features are somewhat difficult to discern. Housed in circular frames, the works are presented as contained moments of chaos.

In her series Recapitulation Theory (2016) maps are transformed into wings and foliage, each feather cut from paper in bright blue and green hues. The wings fan out and overlap one another, creating a new kind of organism. Their symmetry brings to mind the famous Rorschach Test, with its undefined, yet familiar forms. Narcissus I (2017) features the forms of individual snowflakes printed on glass, evoking the x-ray, or the cyanotype. The frames for the series are hexagonal, and interlock like honeycomb, referencing both the naturally occurring formation, and the basic visual representation of molecular structures. The snowflakes reappear in a film Grander Scheme, in which the snowflakes revolve and collide with each other.

The series Tower of Babel feature three tall, elegant fusions of photographic images and colour illustrations, and the works follow a narrative that could be read from top to bottom, or vice versa. A series of apocalyptic, regenerative scenes, the mushroom cloud of a bomb gives rise to a crocodile, and the moon, the ancient tower and the skyscraper. A bed of wild mushrooms forms the foot of Tower of Babel II, and in III the octopus seen in Residue and Excess re-emerges, this time clutching pearls. These associations are equal parts random and highly calculated – in essence, the summation of collage practice as we know it.The circle is repeated at careful intervals throughout the exhibition, coming to full effect in Theodicy (2017), evoking the forms of the microscope and the petri dish. Many of Wildenboer’s works form relations to the artifact behind glass. Theodicy refers to God’s ‘permission of evil’ within the universe in Christian doctrine. An installation mounted on the wall, the work comprises approximately 24 circular works, and an altar-esque relic with a thorn in a vase encased behind glass. This altarpiece forms the crux of the composition, bringing to mind something found in a holy place. Galaxies and biological matter share circular framing, drawing correlations between micro and macro scales of life.

Anima Animus (2017) depicts two pelvic bones belonging to a female-bodied and a male-bodied person. Placed side-by-side, the bones are augmented by moving images overlaid onto their surfaces. A fluttering sphere, seen in Human Nature, is positioned centrally within each bone, toying with ideas of genitalia and arousal. The works’ title adopts Jungian archetypes of the feminine and the masculine, two essentialised concepts that are highly contested in our current discourse. Anima Animus reminds us that we, too, are biological beings. However, ideas of gender have transcended – and as some would argue – have never been contained within confines of the biological.

Compelling still, is to consider the unmistakable hand and labour of the artist herself. In all, the exhibition comprises moments of intense richness that give way to quiet, dream-like reflections. Wildenboer does not exhaust any subject, and within this allowance creates space for wonder. In the production of the exhibition, and her self-curation, her presence forms an additional omnipotent lens, in which she is the gardener of this ecosystem.Humans’ worrisome relationship to the earth is made more interesting when considering the invisible hand of a higher power. Wildenboer offers this suggestion undogmatically, making space for a number of alternatives, and perhaps more importantly, questions. In the extract from‘Theology and falsification: the University discussion’ by Antony Flew published in 1964, provided by the gallery, the presence of a mysterious ‘gardener’ clearly forms the basis for the title of the exhibition.

Essay written for the South African Center for photography
by Jenny Altschuler

 

Barbara Wildenboer’s exhibition, titled Vanitas, created for her Masters of Fine Art studies at the Michaelis School of fine art, UCT in December 2007 and subsequently held at the Association for Visual Arts (AVA) in January 2008, is indeed a treat for serious lovers of photography and the Conceptualist Art genre. Wildenboer is a Conceptualist, using various photographic processes and techniques to bring over ideas of memory held and lost and the imprint of fleeting life recorded.

Most of the pieces in this body of work have grown out of a combination of mixed media with photography as an integral element to the concept, underlining notions of time, as well as the paradoxical relationship between past and present states of being. Photographs are foremost examples of the icons that we keep to refer to what we had, and yet remind us of the loss of that very thing. Because of the historic melancholic iconography of the Vanitas genre of still life, she has found it to be suitable for her own expression of ideas of loss and yearning. Wildenboer considers melancholy and the related experiences of loss and longing as explanatory concepts from which to interpret her own creative endeavors. She emphasizes that mood and personal experience play a formative role in determining the outcome of her work. Interested in the idea of a ‘present absence’ and an ‘absent presence’ (on which the title and content of her thesis dissertation is based) within the items we collect to preserve our memories, Wildenboer recreates the memorabilia of incubation, pregnancy and cocooning which are profound vessels in the process of the creation of life, but which lose the created entities after birth.

Wildenboer states that she experiences melancholy as an emotion that is fed by loss and longing and often consisting of contradicting emotions. “It can be differentiated from mourning in that it is not always necessarily linked to a specific loss but can surface even at the most arbitrary moments. In such a case I see it as expressive of a more general fear experienced when facing existential instability or change.” As profoundly, Wildenboer would like her pieces in Vanitas series to associate the viewer with notions of impermanence and disappearance. She hints that they could be seen as indirectly speaking of the fear of death but in a passive manner characterized by a bittersweet awareness of change, decay, and things coming to an end.

The still life or Vanitas features as a predominant theme in Wildenboer’s work, both in two-dimensional and three-dimensional form. These range from traditional format of still life arrangements (but with non-traditional objects), to flower studies (executed through photography and layered with three dimension pressed flowers and transparent materials), to sculptural installations that echo still life pieces. The still life compositions that make up the body of work are mostly compiled from a variety of collected objects. Groups of empty shells from hatched birds with photographic fossil- like images are delicately tied in soft, porous material so referential of the amniotic female birthing sac, yet the eggs themselves are all broken, post-hatched and past their usefulness. This is a very sad piece, nostalgic for the intimacy of the incubation period yet exquisite in the fragility of the gathering of the delicate broken residues which themselves form this still life after-life.

The exhibition as a whole dissects notions of fragility, disappearance and impermanence. Some of her pieces combine the actual objects of fascination (the subject/object of the lens) with the photographs of the same. After photographing indigenous flowers, Wildenboer has pressed them, both killing and preserving them. These pieces, with pressed flowers and delicate material layered on top of carefully photographed 2 dimensional versions of the same, hold a dichotomy of life and death with the preservation of their beauty and colour through the pressing process yet their obvious lack of life. They seem exactly as in life, yet their life is absent. The layer which is photographic echoes this duality exactly with the idea of photography that captures the lifelike version in all its glory, yet it is no more, it is not alive but only a piece of paper. Pinned with common sewing pins as a layer onto the photographic print, the pieces are also very feminine reminiscent of seamstresses and the delicate patching of garments or embroidered craft pieces.

Wildenboer has enjoyed working with medium format cameras. She owns an old 35mm Pentax as well, but also loves working with Digital photographic techniques. Her Silver Gelatine prints have been exposed onto substrates such as shells, wood, rock and glass to create the suggestion of proof of residue life forces. These imprints or prints accentuate the fossil like effect of archeological finding. Often combining the two dimensional image with 3 dimensional natural and crafted objects, Wildenboer defies the limited perception of the static wall hung photograph. Many of her pieces are installations into which the viewer can walk, or sculptural creations around which the viewer can circle. However even the wall hung framed photographs are layered with each layer leading to another related theme in the concept.

Wildenboer lives in Woodstock, Cape Town with her two sons Lucas and Ivan. Being pregnant and having given birth to both children while doing her Masters degree did not hamper her studies. While in her first pregnancy she traveled to Darat Al Funun in Amman, Jordan, taking up an artist’s residency for a few months and exhibiting the work she did there. The pregnancies also fed directly into Vanitas as through this period, she experienced the cycle of incubation first hand, being the cocoon, the embryonic host of creation. Her work connects itself directly to this experience of intense intimacy with the created entity and then the separation from and loss of the being to its own life.Barbara Wildenboer is indeed a young contemporary artist to watch. She attained a distinction for her Masters degree and is highly dedicated to the expression of her concepts through the medium of photography.