The Melrose Gallery’s – Junkyard Dogs – stars two celebrated South African artists, Willie Bester and Pitika Ntuli. Both are fixated with junk, upcycling, recycling, reenvisioning waste. They are both retrofitters, fabricators – each in his own way gifted in disassembling and reassembling metal parts into radically unforeseen new wholes. As such, they are classically African artists, for the artists of no other continent have displayed a more ingenious and innovative capacity to reboot-retool the excesses of industrial surplus. Africa is the dumpsite. African artists the diviners.
As for ‘Junkyard Dogs’? They are fierce guardians, ruthless, unbreakable. If the descriptor fits Willie Bester and Pitika Ntuli, it is because both were forged out of a resistance culture, both the products of an on-going fight for freedom. This is because Ntuli, like Bester, understands art as an embodied force. Sculpture is the key medium. As Ad Reinhardt wittily remarked, ‘Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.’ It commands and consumes space. In the case of Bester and Ntuli, the mediums are metal and granite, a fusion of the man-made, and the organic. The scale is commanding. Demanding. We cannot unsee a gesture or proposition, because both artists possess a declamatory power.
