THE first time I encountered the work of Jeannette Unite, I felt highly uncomfortable. Here was an artist asking me to see beauty in the heavy machinery of industry, to revel in a "mining aesthetic" despite the contentious place of mining in South African history.That was two years ago. My knee-jerk reaction was to question the association of art and capital, to assume some kind of artistic compromise in the apparent celebration of industrial landscapes and the curious nostalgia for engineering feats of the past.Yet I had to admit there was something remarkable about the animal energy Unite had given to (or discerned in) the headgear towers, making them at once powerful and vulnerable, imposing and decrepit. According to Ivor Powell, "the machine as metonym of masculinised force and enterprise" is "placed in a position of some jeopardy" through Unite’s rendering: "The hard, inflexible and metallic" is "rendered in feathery scratches".This is one of many eloquent observations made in...
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