Retroid Raving

It is that time of year when exams are sat, marked and moderated; when the tedious administrative chores are mainly done - and an academic's mind turns to frivolity.

Of a serious sort, in this instance - because artistic criticism is always serious, even when it isn't.

If you get my drift.

Today I will introduce you to one of the newer works gracing the UCT Upper Campus, which is - for a change - not completely hidden away from public notice.

This is the installation I call "The Philip K Dick Memorial I Ching Footwash Fountain", which is to be found on the north side of the Jammie Plaza.

Quite a handsome and functional feature, for a change, but still rich with hidden and many-layered meaning - almost post-modernistically, if that didn't mean "future".

Consider, if you will, the eight hexagrams of the I Ching - so beloved of PK Dick - laid out neatly around the central pool, with an outer annulus fed by the gentle centre upwelling.  This is so obviously a multi-layered metaphor for the University that it seems hardly worth explaining, but of course, we will.

The flat nature of the piece, modestly unobtrusive in space, symbolises the accessibility of the University to all - except vehicular traffic, of course, which is why the bollards block off the one side.  The shallow annulus, ringing the hexagrams, represents the immersion in scholarship that the University offers to all: no more than one can handle, and often just enough to get to metaphorically wet your feet.

The hexagrams are at once decorative - they are rather tasteful - and redolent with deeper meaning.  They symbolise, to the informed viewer, both the inner and academic circles (closing ranks to exclude the unworthy) and the essentially arbitrary and stochastic nature of the examination and assessment processes of our halls of academe, where one may as well throw the yarrow stalks to inform the marking process as actually read what is on offer from the teeming student masses.

The deeper inner pool, with its mysterious slow upwelling, represents the Deep Inner Circles of our institution: yea, the veritable Beast Down The Hill that is Bremner, from which mysterious and obscure pronouncements and inscrutable writ issues forth.

Of course, it is also a fully-functional footbath, for students wishing to cool their pedal extremities, and for the absent-minded or short-sighted who stumble into it in poor light.  Thus, another layer of metaphor: useful in both vertent and inadvertent ways; as a means of ablution, and as a trap for the unwary.

As I have been trapped here, lo, these 35 years....