Christian Nerf, Barend de Wet
This artwork was loaned to the exhibition Dada South? Experimentation, Radicalism and Resistance curated by Kathryn Smith and Roger van Wyk, Iziko South Africa National Gallery, December 12, 2009–February 28, 2010. It is indexed here as part of Smith and Van Wyk’s revisiting of the Dada South? Archive of materials at A4 Arts Foundation.
b.1956, Boksburg; d.2017, Western Cape
“For many,” Kathryn Smith wrote in her monograph on the artist, “Barend de Wet exists as myth.” And indeed, in offering a short overview of his artistic pursuits, it is hard to resist his mythology. Perhaps it is enough to say that de Wet was an artist of rare agility and generosity. To his mind, all things deserved the attention more often reserved for art’s actions and objects. To some, de Wet’s work was too inconsistent, his interests too disparate, yet such criticisms only overlook the enthusiasm essential to his practice. He believed, he told the critic Sean O’Toole, in “an idea of art as an inquisitive practice composed of many interconnected things: art as knitting, sculpting, performance, painting, even cooking.” De Wet is today remembered as many things – a sculptor, a nudist, yo-yo champion, fire-eater, beekeeper and bodybuilder – but, above all, an individual deeply immersed in considerations of form and process (in life as in art).
b.1970, Johannesburg
A reluctance to category has defined much of Christian Nerf’s practice, as too has a dedication to rule-based experimentation. He is simultaneously a maker of structures and instructions and resistant to established constraints and institutional bureaucracies. This tension – between self-generated and socially expected boundaries – has come to characterise a seeming miscellany of actions, objects, and traces. “What threads, what bookends, what rules have been at work: what accommodates the freedom to play?” He asked in a process project, Archive as Terrarium | Part 3, at A4 Arts Foundation in 2019. “It’s easy to forget that to ‘play by one’s own rules’, one has to first go to the effort to grasp those rules that are already in play.” Collaboration (with people, plants and chance) has long offered Nerf a working logic, where artmaking is reconsidered as a learning exercise in pursuit of 'uncalled-for-newness'. Now in his ‘post-collaborative’ mode, he remains, as ever, hard to pin down – though his studio is no longer itinerant as it once was; the artist now a longstanding resident at Atlantic House. Automated drawings have since become central to his strategy of making, their mechanisms making them endlessly reproducible and shareable.
