Judith Mason

This assemblage was made from salvage from Crown and Rand Mines in Johannesburg, South Africa. It is now the property of the Tatham Art Gallery. Much of the material was collected without the thought of eventually creating a picture. I am a scrap yard junkie and took care of the record player with its draughts-board top and the tool box simply because I found them irresistible. When I came across the weathered first-aid stretchers with their cracked straps and peeling paint I was reminded of the funeral portraiture of the Fayum, that graceful and melancholy coffin painting which enlivened the decayed splendour of Egyptian art shortly before the Christian era and which combined the eclecticism of the Hellenistic period with a naïve charm of its own. The stretchers have a dignity of weight and shape which demand formal arrangement and austere, symbolic treatment. The pun extended to thinking of the mine dumps as pyramids mineshafts as rock-hewn tombs, and the Randlords as Pharoahs. The pyramid motif, echoed in a great many postmodern buildings in Johannesburg suggested the background, where seams in the slate suggest ore and the zigzags profile modern old-fashioned gables. Gradually the assemblage evolved into an essay on how I responded to the objects and to the fragments of history I remembered.

The subject matter is meant to be neither anti-capitalist critique or pro-industrial monument. It is simply meant to be itself; to suggest the variety of men from Zulu to San who sought work on the reef, with the guilded tiger-fish of progress devouring the pastoral buck. The cage like mesh of wire is ubiquitous to South Africa and has a whole lot of realistic, symbolic and graphics connotations. I tried to depict an episode in history with dignity and aggressiveness and pathos and the trivial woven into as intact a composition as I could manage. I would like the spectator to leave the work with a heightened sense of the ephemeral muddle of history rather than the sense that he has been reading a tract. I am very ambivalent towards Johannesburg and towards its cultural achievements, its structures and its economy and one of the reasons why I respect this work is that I allowed that ambivalence to be its essence. Although I have vehement opinions about most things, I find it difficult to produce a purely political or 'Protest' work. The process of thinking in pictorial terms gets in the way. I can never regard the message more important than the vocation. Art has always seemed to me to be master rather than servant, open minded rather than preordained. I have sent multitudes of letters to Cabinet Ministers over the last 40 years, and my angry advice has never been headed.

But I have no doubt that one letter which arrives at it's destination is politically more effective than ten radical pictures on a gallery wall. People who attempt to prescribe to artists with regard to their social or political role make me very sad and deeply suspicious, whether they are the aesthetic arbitrators of the Third Reich or the spokesmen of the liberation movements. They seem to want copywriters who masquerade as artists. Artists do what they are driven to do, copywriters serve their clients. The relationship between society and the artist is adventurous. It assumes that the artist is free to follow his calling and that society will respond to his work as open mindedly as possible. Both parties are committed to taking risks, which is why freedom to practice the arts is such a good measure of any society's confidence and health. Agendas and manifestos are absurd. You cannot send explorers off into uncharted territory with sketches of what the terrain should look like.

That diatribe over, let's get back to the Tombs of the Pharoahs. It has just about everything I want from an image. Lot's of objects trouves, the pleasure of restoring damaged junk to some sort of purpose, the human figure in its frailty, repetitive decoration, a slightly pompous hieratical quality and bits of inconsequential detail as contrast.

I am usually heartily sick of any piece of work when I have finished and months go by before I can look at it with equanimity. This work was different. I delivered it to the gallery early in the morning and then returned home, folded myself into be in the foetal position and mourned its absence.