Serious Play: the trinity session at work
by David Brodie
The first thing I saw on entering the trinity session's solo show, 'M.O.' (for modus operandi/mobile office), were two incredulous-looking young gallery patrons trying to absorb the huge and varied output of this three-person 'artsministration' group. One of them casually let slip a revealing comment: "I can't believe these guys, I had no idea... they are doing fucking everything."
The trinity session's show 'M.O.' is essentially an installed "process review" of the approximately 50 projects the trio of Kathryn Smith, Stephen Hobbs and Marcus Neustetter (aka the trinity session) have engaged with since their conception eighteen months ago. This seems like a ridiculously high number of projects for any recently born creative to have completed, precocious even. But the collective has managed to tackle a diverse range of projects, successfully completing each one with an almost supremely critical (and most definitely playful) command of the schizophrenic environmental and conceptual potentials of communication models in flux.
Speaking at the opening, which coincided with that of Brett Murray's 'White Like Me', Penny Siopis commented on the sense she had of looking at both shows simultaneously as solo offerings and as retrospectives. In the case of the trinity session this observation may seem odd: 'M.O.' is essentially the first large-scale solo outing for the group in this country.
Then again the word retrospective is useful: it acknowledges not only the impressive volume of output, but also the speed with which the trinity session manage to absorb, process and then manifest often dramatically different environmental and informational content in their work. In a recent published review in Art South Africa, Siopis identified this inherent characteristic of the trinity session's modus operandi as "platform-hopping".
The word modus operandi is interesting. Quite literally, it describes a manner of working, and contains an implication that there is an empirical procedure of eliciting correct, normative information from a particular process or action, which will reveal certain patterns of behaviour. In its strictest sense, it may also reference a liberal notion of individual or sole authorship of an act.
The trinity session, however, offer an interpretation of creative production that appears at once beautifully constructed and multi-disruptive. Their method is an anarchic pointer to the reality of contingency: both in meaning and environmental locatedness. Working with adaptable aesthetics and content that is derived through rupture, the undeniable seriousness with which the trinity session play should be seen as a potent new model of communication in a creative community that at times seems desperately in need of such new input.
Opens: 6pm, May 20
Closes: June 21
Standard Bank Gallery, corner Simmonds and Fredericks streets, Johannesburg
Tel: 011 636 4842
E-mail: bjfreemantle@sbic.co.za
Website: www.sbgallery.co.za
Hours: Mon - Fri 8am - 4.30pm, Sat 9am - 1pm
David Brodie is a curator of the contemporary collections at the Johannesburg Art Gallery.
