From the very beginning, humans have been living in storytelling societies. Recordings of stories are found in art and artefacts, with more recent ones in documents which are predecessors of books.
A chance to indulge in those forms of storytelling components was taken by art lovers who attended a charity auction of Professor Jan K Coetzee’s book works hosted by Strauss and Company (Strauss & Co) at the Circa gallery in Rosebank. The book works called Books & Bones & Other Things is a dialogue with a collection of books serendipitously encountered across Europe and South Africa’.
What started as a collection developed into a project to make the author’s own life, as well as life in general, more intelligible to himself and to others.
According to Jackie Murray from Strauss and Company, all of the proceeds raised from the auction were donated to Artist Proof Studio and the Centre for the Less Good Idea.
According to information taken from the brochure for the exhibition, the books in the collection have two things in common – they are old texts with considerable aesthetic appeal. These texts originated from, and bear witness to, the actions, intentions, motivations, joys and hopes, as well as the fears and sufferings of human beings. “Each text narrates a story. But our ability to hear what they narrate is undermined. Most are written in old, inaccessible languages. So, Coetzee cannot merely present these books – he needed to re-narrate them, to deconstruct and even subvert narrative conventions by presenting them in a way that evokes new stories in his mind and the minds of the ‘readers’,” reads the brochure.
He also brought these old texts into a dialogue with each other so that the collection starts telling more than what the individual books can do. “In a similar way to how a small private library in an ordinary family home can reflect something of the family, this collection of documents reflects something of Coetzee’s own roots as they resonate with wider social, cultural, and historical refrains.”
The book works explore the historical development of his society and its structures all steeped in Western thought and tradition.
Coetzee acknowledged that in these European texts the voices of indigenous peoples are silent and their values, laws, and cosmologies – their very lives are largely discounted. This he showed, for instance, in skulls and chains. What survives all individual authors, all human remembering and forgetting, he showed in prehistoric fossils – knowledge in the bones.
Details: Circa gallery www.everard-read.co.za
Strauss & Co www.straussart.co.za
Have you seen Coetzee’s work? Post your reviews on our timeline at Rosebank Killarney Gazette
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