“…Johan Thom’s Hanging Garden, 2016: two bronze feet set atop a glass vitrine on a wooden terrace covered in an off-white polyurethane sludge, its drained, white figure speaking to the changeable politics raging outside the park” (Sean O’ Toole, Artforum: https://www.artforum.com/picks/nirox-foundation-sculpture-park-60507)

A contemporary sculpture in lush garden.

The famed hanging gardens of Babylon serve as first reference. One of the seven wonders of the ancient world, an ideal garden bequeathed to us by the very same civilization that also gave us a mythical tower, and a name: Babylon, cacophonous place of sin and confusion. Today the name conjures up beauty and unease in equal measure.

Our utopian dreams of the garden as space persist but are here perversely rendered in three dimensional form as a messy, material affair. A nightmarish garden inside the ideal space of the Nirox Sculpture park located in the Cradle of Humanity, just outside Johannesburg. But this garden is small and consists of weeds kept inside a massive glass vitrine; a pair of feet (the artists’) cast in bronze placed atop the glass box; a modernist inspired terrace made from wood and mixed media; and, finally, a large mass of polyurethane foam exploding, bulging, oozing and dripping all over the entire structure and its surrounds.

The artist is present throughout the work: the glass vitrine’s dimensions are drawn directly from my body, as is the total weight of the polyurethane foam and bronze feet combined (103 kg). Closer inspection reveals a peculiar, personal detail: at the time of making the mould of my feet I was wearing my favourite household shoes – flip flops (or ‘Crocs’ to use the common brand name).

A modernist inspired terrace serves as the base upon which the drama is played out. Le Corbusier in pine and saligna: clean horizontal and vertical lines, the entire form literally hangs from a central core of four wooden pillars, with modular sections that can easily be fitted, modified and moved. But this is Africa and the structure immediately reminds of the familiar appendages of homes, lodges and hotels the continent over: the ‘deck’ that extend the home into the untamed space of the veld – a space reserved primarily for luxury, leisure and looking (breakfast, sundowners, bring your binoculars, you might see something wild out there).

The glass vitrine is the ever present sparring partner of the museum visitor. The cool air of detachment and disembodiment surrounds its very presence. A foil hidden in plain sight: protect and (pre)serve. This will last you will not. It is made with surgical precision and contained in a crisp polished stainless steel outer frame.

And the polyurethane foam? It is a synthetic material predominantly used in the building industry to plug gaps and to keep structures such as wooden walls in place. If not exposed to direct sunlight it has a lifetime of seventy years (or longer). It is fire retardant and sealed here with a layer of UV protection. Nothing can disguise the fact that this industrial material, that it will not last as long as glass, bronze. This material is the very antitheses of the relative, though persistent, wholesomeness and naturalness of the garden and the ideals that underpin it.

To end, a question. Can something not be both celebration and critique? Is it not possible to love the complex mess we are part of and to still harbor serious reservations about it too?

In this moment in this country.