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project description End of the World (Cape Point), 2004

Cape Point, at the southern tip of South Africa, was once believed to be the place where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet. It is one of those places that reminds us of our transience. End of the World (Cape Point) is a visual echo of that exchange. At Cape Point, I sensed, in a moment of intense spiritual awareness, the meeting between mortality and immortality.

The end of the world, like a thief in the night, can come at any moment. It cannot be owned or known yet, paradoxically, it is solid, ever-present, for the end is included in ‘now and forever’. There can be no doubt that the end of anything has an attraction and beauty of its own; a calm inevitability, or the promise of renewal.

Abrie Fourie’s Netherlands
Bronwyn Law-Viljoen

I hope I may be forgiven for quoting, in the opening paragraph of a short meditation on the work of a Christian photographer, the words of an arch-Nietzschean and determined disbeliever.
Here is E.M. Cioran, the twentieth-century Rumanian philosopher, ruminating on time:

                      Moments follow each other; nothing lends them the illusion of a content or
                      the appearance of a meaning; they pass; their course is not ours, we
                      contemplate that passage, prisoners of a stupid perception. 1

Cioran’s is the rather bleak, anti-humanist vision of a thinker who fails to see how moments – fragments of time if you like – can be thought of as having any content, or even an illusion of content. This is a direct challenge to the rather worn-out notion that photography captures moments in time, an idea that is propped up by several assumptions: that moments can be caught like butterflies in a net, that our ability to catch them means that they can be separated from that great, unrelenting and undifferentiated continuum, that the moments that we are able to seize are meaningful and, finally, that the camera – the photographer – can separate them from time precisely because they mean something. Cioran’s view, however, is that we cannot fill up the moment with meaning because it is not ours to do so. We do not own time, it flows on without us. If this is the case, where does that leave the photographer, that most humanist of artists, whose slivers of time are an attempt to shore up hope against the threat of an ever-encroaching scepticism?

In counterpoint to Cioran, here is the critic Thomas McEvilley remarking on Rodin’s fragment sculptures (arms, hands, heads): sometimes, says McEvilley, the fragment was for Rodin merely a “curiosity that might be shown to a visitor,” but at other times it was

                      not a fragment, or a tiny but perfect detail, but a wholeness that was not
                      tiny, not broken, not lost, simply isolated as under a conceptual
                      microscope so as more intently to appreciate its inexplicable yet
                      undeniable truth as itself.2

It is possible, according to this worldview, to look at minutiae, at parts of things, as containing meaning. But even more than this, the artist can differentiate, can separate parts from the whole in order to appreciate more fully the truth of those parts, and, by implication, the truth of the whole from which the fragment is torn.

The work of Abrie Fourie falls somewhere between the scepticism of Cioran’s position and the humanism implicit in the belief that a fragment – of time, of an object or a body – contains a truth. In particular, Fourie’s work Netherlands tries to negotiate the divide between a kind of postmodern diffusion of form and meaning and an essentially Christian view that the centre holds. The work, through its formal arrangement as a series of photographs along a horizontal plane in a light-box, offers us the opening, middle, and resolution of linear narrative. In other words, it holds out to us the possibility of a story, of something that begins and ends and whose meaning we can detect. But since there is no clear connection between the photographs grouped in this series, the very idea of progression is disrupted before things have even got under way.

And as if to underscore this formal and philosophical disruption, the first photograph shows a pile of broken glass. The sharp, clear lines of the glass give way, in the second image, to a study of water running down a wall. The indistinctness of the picture is heightened by telltale vignetting – the black shadows at each corner of the image that may be caused by imperfect optics or a filter on the lens – reminiscent of nineteenth-century photographs or those made by pin-hole cameras. The penultimate shot, an empty corner of an empty room that alludes to the work of photographers like Thomas Demand or Jeff Wall, is framed on the left by an image of a dead pigeon and a foot leaving the bottom edge of the photograph and, on the right, by a picture of a child bending over a broken beer bottle.

The greyness and the bizarre seductiveness of that empty corner where the seams of wall and floor meet, open up a space in the sequence of images from left to right. The child’s bending form is not quite enough to keep us from returning to that non-place. It has the lonely feel of a motel room, of a petrol-station bathroom. Coming after the dead pigeon, it is reminiscent of a mortuary.

But despite the fascination with death and pain to which this work bears witness, the photographer loses neither his sense of humour nor his need to resolve the problems raised by the juxtaposition of several apparently unconnected events. The shards of glass in the opening shot resolve themselves into the broken Heineken bottle in the last, and the fascinated child – Fourie’s tongue-in-cheek self-representation – has its bum pointed firmly in the direction of that mortifying grey corner.

Netherlands, like several other of Fourie’s works, is troubled by an internal contradiction. On the one hand it displays a need to apprehend the moment, the fragment, as a true thing, but on the other it eschews the neat resolutions that this position promises. Fourie is seduced, in other words, by “the illusion of content,” but at the same time, he is a deeply ironical artist, fascinated by the possibility that images may convey not content or meaning but a profound dislocation, that indeed they reveal to us the shortcomings of perception.

1 A Short History of Decay. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1949, p. 13
2 Sculpture in the Age of Doubt. New York: Allworth Press, 1999, p. 389