An Apologetics of Scale

Stella Viljoen

The Stellenbosch-based artist Ernst van der Wal is always ahead of the game. He has a sixth sense about what philosophical concerns are going to be important in the near future. He anticipates moods and ideas in a wonderfully gentle, unassuming way. Several years ago, he started talking to me about ‘small’ as an intellectual concept. He was thinking about scale as a philosophical metaphor for the contrast between the overly visible and visualised versus that which is invisible or overlooked. This notion of the large and small felt aptly political.

An exhibition of Van der Wal’s work in 2019 included imposing drawings of planets (Figure 1). These monumental entities were drawn in pencil and ink, scratched into the surface of the paper in digital-looking Ben Day dots and obsessive cross-hatching. The spherical (or Delaunesque) orbs were juxtaposed with amorphous, inky constellations that felt like depictions of infinity, the manifestations of epic scale. The solar systems were mimicked by or even superimposed on equally daunting depictions of viruses (Figure 2), specifically the HI virus that continues to haunt queer masculinity with a magnitude that feels prescient as Donald Trump takes office again and initiates a new era of vilification and denial, also for the LGBTQIA+ community. In an interview Van der Wal (2024) says he is intrigued by work done in the field of microscopy, “especially where the intersection of art and science is concerned.” His drawings are based on photographic images that are science-y, but not alienating.

In their book on the scale of photography, Jussi Parikka and Tomáš Dvořák (2021: 4) note how contemporary photography is often characterized “in the apocalyptic terms of a deluge or avalanche, an explosion or eruption, a tsunami or storm.” For them, these terms are appropriate because they convey the “unmanageable and unstoppable cascade of images” that warrants language with vast or catastrophic overtones (2021: 4). Their critique is that the microscope, and by extension the camera, no longer mediates between us and the world in a helpful way, but that, rather, the pervasiveness of the technologized image implies a prevenance or foreboding that actually renders the world more “opaque and obscure” (2021: 4). As Susan Sontag (1979: 23) reminds us,

Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no. Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph. [emphasis in original]

Van der Wal’s exhibition resists the purely clinical or masculinist tropes of medicine and engineering in favour of something more animistic and magical. The exhibition at the SMAC gallery in Stellenbosch was titled ‘Invasion’. The grid patterns used by Van der Wal to capture the craters on the surface of a planet and microscopic textures of a virus reminded one of the early acronym given to the virus: GRID, or ‘gay-related immune deficiency.’ Yet, the labour and time and care invested in each drawing undermined the objectification implicit in the notion of a grid. In that way, the drawings served as a defence of even the most precarious life-forms. Van der Wal alluded to a smallness in time and space via a representation of the magnificent, the terrible, the sublime.

In Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful from 1757, he posited the value of largesse as affective device. Burke explained a causal architecture in which ‘the beautiful’ is lucid, symmetrical, understandable and aesthetically pleasing. In contrast, ‘the sublime’ is the terrible, unpredictable, that which destroys and degrades, like a virus. The latter notion is the more affectively laden one because it puts the viewer in their place, it humbles them in a way that Burke understood to be aesthetically enjoyable and philosophically meaningful. It is a means of ‘sizing’ humanity. How this idea translates in the landscape of the 21st century is a curious question. The largesse of the technological and political despots of the moment implies a kind of sublime force that demonises and diminishes those who contradict them. In other words, although the chaos of the sublime makes for entertaining myths, the reality is often a form of humiliation (an experience that in the current political economy is weirdly gendered).

But ‘the beautiful’ is not to be forgotten.

In 2024, Van der Wal started to work with marble. One would think this would involve sculptures the size of the Pieta but with characteristic novelty, but surprisingly, his art has become small. The first experiments are little manuscripts and books that feel intimate, personal… that do not impose with drama and trauma but gently counter the sublime with the power of the beautiful. The object of this beauty is the book, the script, knowledge … that affect us by its very smallness (Figures 3 – 5). Again, Parikka and Dvořák (2021: 4) point out the phenomenological strain of a world in which there is so much information and so little wisdom in terms of what constitutes ‘knowledge’. They explain that the “promise of total visibility and transparency, whether joyfully embraced or worryingly defied, opens a horizon of blindness, just as looking directly into too much light means we see nothing at all” (2021: 4). This feeling of blindness is something to be grieved.

The books Van der Wal sculpts draw on a tradition of commemoration in which small marble books are carved to honour or remember a loved one who has died. The artist is himself struggling with grief and uses the process of sculpting into the soft stone as a means of processing loss. The almost translucent stacks are delicate and vulnerable. They are venerated but in ways that seem to imply that it is the small and subtle that is worthy of attention, not the grandiose. Writing about Greek miniaturisation, Oliver Pilz (2011: 20) points out that the miniature version of an object is often a more effective way of articulating its semiotic meaning, since the miniature usually cannot fulfil the function of the original. In other words, it is purely symbolic, a simulacrum.

Van der Wal explains (2024) that he is “interested in the idea, condition and intentional activation of small as a site of resistance.” He describes these first material explorations of ‘text’ as “galvanising small as a tactical refusal – a refusal to conform, live up or cede to the large and the monumental.” For Van der Wal, the beautiful too is a site for critical reactivation, a means of leveraging our attention toward the ideas (and subjectivities) that are deemed insignificant or unimportant. Read alongside ‘Invasion’, the exhibition of marble booklets at Oude Leeskamer in 2024 becomes an articulate invitation to reconsider knowing or knowledge as something precious and precarious. The installation is aptly entitled ‘books for lovers (past, present, future)’. There is political persuasion here but it is so gentle as to be almost indiscernible. The work evades argument and circumnavigates ideological positioning. It refuses taxonomy in a way that makes it easy to accept but not easy to understand.

In her book on longing, Susan Stewart (1993: 66) explains that the “miniature always tends toward tableau rather than toward narrative, toward silence and spatial boundaries rather than toward expository closure.” Though symbolic it refuses grand oratures. Perhaps this is why miniature objects remind of childhood when even the child themselves is miniature and playing with small things is a gesture toward rehearsing adulthood. The roleplay of the child is usually small and quiet, humble in the characters and narratives enacted. In the realm of childhood hierarchies are often disregarded, objects and roles are imbued with unexpected or counterintuitive worth. This is an upside-down phase where what is required is time, moral complexity and patience, not power or “expository closure”. In the song “The Book of Love” by the Magnetic Fields, we hear: “The book of love is long and boring / No one can lift the damn thing.” The book of love involves so much posturing and melodrama (the kitsch gestures of adult Romance) that it inevitably becomes “long and boring” but that doesn’t actually matter. What matters in the song as in life is that our lover reads to us, like a parent to a child. The time and attention they give transforms the ornamental or kitsch aspect of love into the profound. It draws us back into a childhood in which there was endless, unconditional care.

As Burke anticipates the move from Neoclassicism to Romanticism, so Van der Wal recognises our political climate of shouting voices as one requiring an art that whispers. For a brief moment he produces objects that feel weighty and material yet also ghostly and ethereal. They relay the ordered beauty of the Neoclassical, yet contain something of the evasive and unrequited romance of Caspar David Friedrich’s Romanticism. This is what we need right now – small, quiet interventions that use art to attest to the beautiful. And the power of these almost escapist little books is precisely that they upend the gender binary in which the beautiful is feminine and the sublime masculine. Here the beautiful is authored by the masculine, and his purpose is to offer an apologetics of taste. Instead of the garish gestures of the political aristocracy, he gives us a language of grief in greyscale, a moment of scholarly respite for us to gather our strength before the coming storm.

Sources cited: