Wine estates have become the new front line for fine arts in SA. From Dylan Lewis and his ubquitious metal cats that can’t miaow to William Kentridge competing with Anthony Lane designing wine labels, there are more craftspersons in the cellar than artists in the sun at Zoo Lake. The best IMHO is “land artist” Strijdom van der Merwe.

His work is so transitory, the only thing that remains is a photograph and a memory. I spoke to him at Salt restaurant in Bantry Bay where the breakers roll in, direct from Brazil.

You made a sculpture by placing three thousand red paper boats on the Taal Monument in Paarl.

“It was an artistic intervention. My Afrikaans language came to the Cape with Jan van Riebeeck on three little boats. Language is fragile, so I made some paper boats; Afrikaans is in danger, so I made them red and placed them all over the monument. After ten minutes, the wind came up and blew them all into a corner. Then it changed direction and blew them into another one.

Time is an important factor in my work. I make something on a beach and take a series of photos as the wind and sea destroys it. It gets more interesting as you loose control.”

But how do you make a living as a full-time artist with such whimsical work – what is the business model?

“Most of my work ends up as photo-documentation. I make ten prints and sell the first five at one price and the last five at another. As it doesn’t exist anymore, I also supply a map to indicate where the work took place, to provide a geographic context. Lately, I’ve become interested in the map itself, in the contours, which are distances, which translate to time. Our lives are wrapped around time, so there goes the whole circle again.

I’m absolutely useless when it comes to pricing my work. For me, I think ‘I’ve done it, that’s it.’ I need an agent. My first big break came with Mark Coetzee who had this tiny gallery in a shop window in Bree Street, Cape Town. It was called the Mark Coetzee Fine Art Cabinet. I did my first major installation with him at the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival at Oudtshoorn. Working with Mark made clear the role of a curator/agent to me. But I’ve lost touch – last I heard, he was a major curator in Miami.

Earlier this year, I was working on a project in the Karoo. It was hot and I was sweating. My cell phone went off and there was this man telling me I had won a medal of honour from the Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns for my land art – they gave one for music to Chris Chameleon. I asked him if there was any money and he said ‘no.’ I wanted to tell him how much the award meant to me and how hard I worked to make land art, but he rung off.

In my acceptance speech, I plan to tackle the issue of materialism in art. No one talks about art anymore, just how much it’s worth. Everyone is trained to play the success game but we don’t speak about our art or our hearts. Look at Dylan Lewis and his sculptures. All you hear about is the R28 million from the Christie’s auction.

I went up to Sandton – the Gautrain people want to commission a sculpture park. I stayed in a hotel opposite the JSE for a week. It was a totally different world of bling as far as you can see.”

And quite different from your own home in Stellenbosch.

“I live in a cottage on a farm in the Jonkershoek valley. My day starts with a trip in to town, to a coffee shop to read the papers and then I go home and start working. I’ve now lived in Stellenbosch for longer than anywhere else, so I consider myself a Bolander. The town works: it’s small enough that you can park outside the post office and post a letter. But it’s big enough to support theatre, public lectures and musical performances. I’m the chap people see around town and think ‘shame, is he still here?’

I was born on a farm Meyerton, in the Vaal triangle when there still was one. I was the youngest of four brothers – hence my name. All the family names had been used up and this was my dad’s big chance. He was a fan of die leeu van die noorde (lion of the north), Prime Minister JG Strijdom, so I was christened Johannes Gerhardus Strijdom van der Merwe.

One brother is a predekant and you can find him most days in the meditation centre at Hartebeespoort Dam. Another is Professor of Philosophy here at Stellenbosch and the eldest one got the farm. It’s next to the Oprah Winfrey school, and the plan is to develop it, so we hope that one day, he’ll give us each a plot.

I was four years younger than my nearest sibling, so I spent a lot of time alone on the farm and ended up looking at a grasbol (ball of grass) for a long time. When I studied art at Stellenbosch, I put lines of bricks everywhere, across desks, across the floor, which got in people’s way. So they said to me, study Carl Andre but take your bricks outside. Which is how I got into land art.

I had a job as a graphic designer with Sanlam for a month. Then I went back to Varsity as a part-time lecturer. I would run out of my office at 4:25 everyday to get on with my actual life.

At the age of thirty I quit to do my own thing, which was quite brave. I still think perhaps I’m crazy – I could be wearing a pair of Woolworth’s pants with a nice little belt and a nice little home in the suburbs. Instead, I went to Prague and studied soft sculpture for six months.

The first day, the professor said ‘go home and make a sculpture – but don’t buy anything at the hardware store.’ This started me thinking about making art from found objects. It was during the communist period and one work had a big effect on me: rows of figures made out of material, taking a salute. Then the figures were set alight – that started to interest me. A sculpture that lasts for five minutes. Learning to speak Czech didn’t work, so I came home.”

You’re now a full-time land artist.

“I belong to two organizations: Artists in Nature and www.greenmuseum.org and have been overseas a couple of times on artist residencies. I’ve developed a circle of friends and from that, get commissions. The most recent was a sculpture for the Simonsberg wine producers but I made a big mistake. I should have asked them for half the payment for the job in wine.

When people asked me ‘which is your best work?’ I agree with Mark Rothko: ‘my next one.’ I’m very positive about SA art at the moment. It’s much better than it was ten years ago when everyone was sitting around waiting for the National Gallery to do something. Artists like Jeremy Wafer and Sandile Zulu are doing really interesting things.

I had an exhibition at the Focus Contemporary Gallery in Long Street in Cape Town. It was in the morning as my gallerist, Migo Mantz, reckons people are too lazy to come back into town in the afternoon. It dealt with issues around global warming – melting ice caps and desertification. I wanted to draw a line through the city showing where the new shoreline would be after the sea levels rise.”

Who knows, if global warming continues, perhaps the Lewis Karol skyscrapers of glass and steel at the bottom end of Long Street will turn out to be land art as transient as the driftwood and sandcastles Strijdom sculpts across Table Bay on Bloubergstrand.

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