Notes

The present lot appeared in Ecstatic Archive, a spectacular exhibition at the Goodman Gallery that continued the artist’s series of disorienting maps.

Gerard Marx has been working with two sources of archival material. The first is a collection of decommissioned geographic, geological and political maps from the past two centuries, which were saved from being pulped, while the second is of a more personal nature, comprising outdated maps donated by individuals burdened by a nostalgic attachment to the documents, but unsure what to do with them. Rupturing the flatness of these maps, Marx has reworked the material with the dedicated rigor of a cartographer charting ever more imaginative territories.

‘At the existential core of the nation state (and the modern idea of a community of nation states) is the power to define boundaries: who is in, who is out; who is legitimate, who is not; who can be seen and who must remain invisible. The boundaries are socialised through cartographical practices of map-making,’ writes Edgar Pieterse in the exhibition catalogue (Goodman Gallery, 2019), offering a socio-historical context to Marx’s area of inquiry.

Over time then maps take on an authoritative quality. This legitimacy in turn reflects our confidence in the structures that undergird society. But what happens when our faith in these systems wane? In such uncertain times there is a need to accept what we can’t control. This inability to fully discern where we may be heading requires a certain level of fortitude … By reckoning with the past in this manner Marx’s drawings open up the space for possible alternative futures.

‘The physical world haunts these maps and there is always this sense that by altering the map one can affect reality, which really means by shifting the way you look, one can affect what is seen,’ says Marx.

Source: Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.

Exhibited

Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, Ecstatic Archive, January 26 to March 9 2019.