Violence/silence at the US Art Gallery, Stellenbosch
by Sue Williamson
At the back of the gallery, a video played: a neatly dressed man is eating
breakfast at a white clothed table which butts up against a wall.
Comfortably, methodically he butters, bites, stirs, sips. Suddenly an unseen
force propels him out of his chair, and upside down on to the table,
smashing into the breakfast things, jammed against the wall, Coffee drips
onto the floor from an overturned cup. On one level, the moment is absurd,
hilarious, pure Marx brothers. In the context of 'Violence/Silence', the
instantaneous transition is heart-stopping. Ordered domesticity disrupted
without warning by an unseen act of violence - or an internal urge? - with
an unpredictable and possibly fatal result. The artist is Marco Paulo Rolla
of Brazil, and the performance took place on 'Violence' at the NSA Gallery
in Durban.
Curated by Greg Streak, 'Violence/Silence', which has just closed at the
University of Stellenbosh Art Gallery, is a Pulse project, part of the Rain
international artists network initiated by the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.
V/S was an extended project in which four South African artists - Paul
Edmunds, Carol-anne Gainer, Luan Nel and Streak himself were joined by four
visitors - Bharti Kher (India), Adriano Lestido (Argentina), Marco Paulo
Rollo (Brazil) and Ivan Grubanov (Serbia).
The group met in Durban in June, and, as leg one of a marathon session of
interacting and artmaking, together made the 12 hour drive to Nieu Bethesda
travelling in a kombi through the arid Karoo landscape to the isolated
little village whose most famous inhabitant was outsider artist Helen
Martins of the Owl House. Here, the task set for the artists was to think
about making work for two shows: 'Violence' to be shown at the NSA in
Durban, and 'Silence' which would open simultaneously in and around Nieu
Bethesda, and which the group would return to instal (having been back to
Durban in the meantime to make work and instal at the NSA. Says Edmunds in a
catalogue essay, "While I can't speak for any of the others, I know that my
response to the landscape caught me unaware and drew from me work I didn't
expect to produce".
Edmunds' comment encapsulates the value of this kind of experience: an
artist who has perhaps become used to working in a certain way, addressing
particular themes, must rethink all of that in the face of a new environment
and in the company of freshly met artist colleagues.
All this peripatetic art making came together in one place for the first
time in Stellenbosch. While the work could, of course, be considered and
enjoyed as individual pieces, it did help to read the extremely informative
catalogue and look at the work against the background of the artist and the
circumstance. Watching the video on the making of the show was also good.
Some of the work: Bharti Kher propped up three jackal skins against the wall
with three logs covered with thousands of brightly coloured sperm shaped
stick ons - her piece was called The bars on your windows. Luan Nel evoked
shades of the Brothers Grimm with his Night Light, an internally lit
fibreglass goose on a rising slope of grass, set in a niche. Carol-anne
Gainer picked up fragments lying around in on the Nieu Bethesda streets,
small mementoes of a visit - a shard of blue and white china, a bleached
vertebra - and gives them significance by presenting them as large, highly
detailed images. Drawn to the subtle sedimentary patterns of slate
flagstones, Edmunds took a square steel plate, and exhibiting his normal
obsession with creating surface, hammered into it seven thousand holes at
different angles to suggest these undulations. This evocative piece was
suspended at ankle level above the floor by a rope, though I thought that
decision to hang the piece in the darkened room where Rolla's video was
showing, making it difficult to see the surface at all, overdid the
underplayed angle.
Streak took the moment in Peter Weir's film Witness in which a young boy
watches a throat cutting and revideos it, plays that, and revideos it and so
on - so the dramatic moment becomes progressively degraded with each
showing, until it becomes almost abstract. But not quite.
This was an exhibition which required a willingness by viewers to gain a
little understanding of the circumstances of it being made for maximum
enjoyment - but even the casual visitor was rewarded.
The show ran from November 11 to 28.
US Art Gallery, corner Dorp and Bird Streets, Stellenbosch
Tel: (021) 808 3524
Email: usmuseum@maties.sun.ac.za
Hours: Mon - Fri 9am - 5pm, Sat 9am - 1pm
