The title of Talia Goldsmith’s sculpture series – SISYPHUS – alludes to myth; namely, a story of eternal futile toil and the absurdity of human existence, embodied in the figure of a man forever failing to push a rock to its summit. However, in his rethinking of the myth, Albert Camus notes that ‘The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy’. This turnaround, away from despair, towards the embrace of toil, is, for Camus, deeply connected to a vision of ‘culture, and the freedom it implies’, that cannot ignore imperfection. Culture is both necessary and imperfect, and, as ‘authentic creation’ it is ‘a gift to the future’.

 

It is with this unblinkered positivity, that we must consider Talia Goldsmith’s revision of the Myth of Sisyphus. Like Camus, she holds fast to the vitality of sincere creativity, which, if mired in difficulty, is also an overcoming of that difficulty. Her ‘rocks’, piled one above the other, realigns an age-old uphill struggle. Now we see them shot through a steel rod – rivetted. While by no means similar in look, Goldsmith’s sculptures evoke gabions – a metal mesh container filled with stones – though, in her case, the sequence is vertical. Furthermore, Goldsmith’s ‘stones’ – formed with wire mesh, cement mix and plaster, injected with polyurethane foam, painted with acrylic pigment, finally sheathed with a UV water resistant sealer – are illusory.

 

Goldsmith’s rocks are simulated. Their vivid organic colours – blue, yellow, green, grey, among others – suggest an unreal dissonance. Precariously yet elegantly balanced, her towers of stone speak to hope, to a future, in which the Anthropocene – the man-made abuse of nature, its unerring drive to contaminate – still finds the capacity for grace and beauty. Herein lies the strength of Talia Goldsmith’s series. One cannot refute the imperfect beauty of her elongated forms. Rubble too, is art. Her sculptures, in this dark and fearful and confusing time, are our consolation.

                                                                                                                                                 ----- Ashraf Jamal

 

ASHRAF JAMAL is the writer-researcher for ArtBankSA and a research associate in visual culture at the University of Johannesburg. He is the co-author of Art in South Africa: The Future Present, and the author of Predicaments of culture in South Africa, Love themes for the wilderness, A million years ago in the 90s, The Shades, In the World: Essays on Contemporary South African Art, Strange Cargo: Essays on Art, and Looking into the mad eye of history without blinking. Abstraction & The Figure is forthcoming.