Once not so long ago, before I had bothered to get a driver’s licence, I took a train from Johannesburg to Grahamstown for the National Arts Festival. Four hours into the journey, after my cabin-fellows and I had finally shooed the dysfunctional child from next door who had been licking our window since we pulled out of the station, I plugged my ‘phone charger into the shaving plug point provided in the cabin and the train suddenly stopped. It stayed stopped for at least an hour, and I pretended to sleep, the evidence of my electronic misdemeanor buried deep in my bag.* The train resurrected, eventually, but was headed in the opposite direction, back towards Johannesburg. Then it stopped again. Time for two hours’ worth of coffee-coloured bath water and horse burgers from the onboard BJ’s. Then it started again. And stopped again. Backwards and stopping time accounted for, the journey took 28 hours — that’s ten more than I paid for.

My most recent blogging activity has been something like this train ride — erratic and slow, verging on backwards. The point of the anecdote, or at least the point that tried to suggest itself in the moment of guilt that preceded my writing this, was to fashion a link between some sort of indirect apology for my scarcity in the blogosphere and what I really want to talk about — Small Worlds, Christo Doherty’s solo exhibition at the Substation gallery, Wits School of Arts. This exhibition has a lot to do with trains, whereas my reasons for not having written for ages don’t (unless you count keeping a car on the road as one of them), so let’s just stick with Christo.

Small Worlds is an exhibition of photographs and a video installation that track constructions of a fantasy South Africa through representations of the landscape by railway modellers. The thesis of the exhibition is two-fold, and very neatly reasoned. First, Doherty, who is Head of Digital Art at the Wits School of Arts, reminds us that, although the internet has made virtual worlds like Second Life ubiquitous, it did not invent them. He observes that these virtual worlds in many cases take their cues from pre-existing analogue versions of alternative “small worlds”. Following new media theorist Lev Manovich, Doherty asks in his exhibition catalogue, “Shouldn’t we try to understand the psycho-geography of the new virtual worlds through exploring earlier analogue precedents?”

The second aspect of the thesis looks closely at the types of landscapes created by a number of railway modellers Doherty found under rocks and other such hidden places around the country. Each photograph on the exhibition depicts a model train poised in a particular hand-built “layout”, with each modeller credited for his efforts in the work’s title. What is common to many of the layouts is that they represent the bygone South Africa of their creators’ childhoods, or rather, the pastoral paradise of veld and mines as manipulated through years of memory. Incidentally, the miniature inhabitants of these scenes are overwhelmingly white and male, which is echoed in the demographic spectrum of the modellers. Black characters are rare — they don’t even crack it as manual labourers — and where they do appear, they are clearly aberrant, disruptive presences.

Although no digital small worlds are represented in the show, the relationship between digital and analogue small worlds is implied in the screen-like scale and media of the works. For instance, the photographs are roughly the size of a computer or television screen. They also interpret three-dimensional small worlds as flat images. This means that their three-dimensionality is only implicit, as it would be were they digital virtual worlds engaged with via a screen. The video installation — my favourite part of the exhibition — is of a much larger scale and is projected onto a wall. In this work, Doherty attached a tiny video camera to a model train and then whizzed it around a model track. The visuals are blurry and ambiguous and, if the stations and landscape were not so eerily still and empty of human presence, the changing scenery could easily be captured from real life. At one point in the video sequence we catch a glimpse of Doherty controlling the train from the edge of the model environment. This is dizzying as it jolts us into a sense of the proper scale of this environment, but it also alerts us to the disjuncture between the virtual world of the model train, which until this point had aped reality quite well, and the real world from which the model world is controlled.

It’s all very The Matrix meets Thomas the Tank Engine. For that alone, you should see it. But you only have until Thursday, so best you hurry off to Wits School of Arts, endure the disgruntled parking wardens and see Small Worlds.

The details:

Small Worlds runs at the Substation gallery, opposite the Wits Theatre, until Thursday November 27. To get there, drive (or walk) down Jorissen Street and turn left into Station Street to enter the Wits School of Arts (WSOA) complex. Alternatively, you may want to park on Jorissen and walk in, as parking legally inside the WSOA complex is nearly impossible in the daylight.

*A note to my engineer readers: I am now aware of the extreme unlikelihood of my misplugged phone charger having rerouted a train.

• None

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 at 9:51 am and is filed under Perspective. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.