'Euphemism': Kathryn Smith at the South African National Gallery
by Lloyd Pollak
Despite its undeniable slickness and gloss, Kathryn Smith's 'Euphemism' is a rag, tag and bobtail farrago of ill-assorted miscellania and marginalia. Although the show has been on the road for months, one suspects that some essential process of cerebral digestion failed to occur, and that Smith's creative juices never dissolved the separate strands of inspiration into a meaningful and cohesive whole. There is scant thematic linkage, little logical progression and no self-critical rigour in this parade of unravelled threads and dangling loose ends.
What is the show about? All and nothing, I concluded after listening to the artist speak about her work at a walk-about at the South African National Gallery. Smith, a lady deeply attached to the sweeping generalisation, claimed that the Jack the Ripper killings of 1888 were the harbinger of the modern era which she described as the age of the serial killer. Through verbal sleight of hand it was then possible for her to imply that 'Euphemism' concerned itself with progress, modernity, the industrialised world, sexual repression, gender difference, and every other major theme you could imagine.
This is specious sophistry. The modern era may be the age of the serial killer, but it is also the age of the micro-chip, the age of space travel, the age of terrorism, the age of women's liberation, the age of globalisation, you name it.
Smith establishes a parallel between her artistic practice and forensic investigation, inasmuch as the detective, like the artist, weaves narratives from 'seemingly meaningless debris'. The show consists of photography in the main, but there are also photolithographs, two videos and a cluster of original Sickert graphics. A seasoned FBI investigator's classic phrase, 'Never look for unicorns until you've run out of ponies', is constantly seen, either tattooed on Smith's body, or embroidered upon her handkerchief. These words act as a leitmotif, and also inspire Episodes: The Hour Has Come, But Not The Man.
In this suite of Shermanesque photographs, Smith - attired in frothy, virginally white attire - plays a Marie Antoinette-like Rousseauist shepherdess, disporting herself amidst unicorns in idyllic pastoral settings. Despite the link with the adage, Episodes hardly advances Smith's analysis of 'the connections between artistic practice and forensic investigation', and its presence seems arbitrary.
Cindy Sherman is a constant inspiration, but Smith suffers by comparison. Sherman's movie stills possess an urgency and tension that compel the viewer to forge a narrative that explains the ambiguous situations in which the artist portrays herself. In this process, she transcends all artifice: the coincidence between her and the character she impersonates becomes absolute, as does the suspension of disbelief. Smith's glamorised images of herself as a slain Edwardian harlot in the video Jack in Johannesburg, as a murder victim covered in maggots in Memento Mori, and as a bored modern spouse in her contemporary make over of Sickert's Ennui, look rigged, stagy and contrived. Smith never becomes her subject as Sherman does, and her charade-like photography generates an irritating sense of theatrical pretence, rather than Sherman's illusion of reality. The self-indulgent posturing rapidly wears thin, particularly as Smith's photographs lack the dense framework of stylistic and historical reference implicit in Sherman's constant allusions to film history, film noir, Hitchcock and a variety of Hollywood genres. The framed stills of the cast from the video Jack in Johannesburg for example, are vapid, ingratiating period decorations no different from the artfully posed 'studies' of pert but aged actresses that adorned theatre programs in the 1950's.
The two psychogeographies consist of methodically researched on-site photographic documentation. In the first Smith superimposes reproductions of Sickert's Dieppe paintings over her own photographs of the same sites taken 120 years later. This arid exercise smacks of pedestrian art historical scholarship, rather than art, and all it yields is a record of how little this coastal backwater has changed over the period.
Psychogeography is posited upon the anti-rationalist belief that some psychological residue of what once took place upon a site will remain rooted there forever. If Walter Sickert really was Jack the Ripper, as the crime writer, Patricia Cornwell claims in her Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed, some psychic vibration should theoretically survive Sickert's sojourn in France. No such posthumous agitation animates Smith's photographs which simply present a somnolent provincial hamlet where it is always Sunday afternoon, and nothing untoward ever seems to have happened.
Smith's photographs of the London homes and suburbs occupied by convicted serial killers also prove the fallacy of this weird mystic credence. These humdrum images of housing stock resonate all the thrill of an estate agent's window for, of course, neither the murderers nor their victims have made any discernible visual impact upon the environment.
In Memento Mori Smith presents the decaying body of a Ripper victim with ghoulish relish, revelling in the flies and maggots that swarm over the faked-up corpse. Anything lurid and sensational is grist to her mill, and accordingly she presents a series of photolithographs revolving around the CIA's alleged involvement in Marilyn Monroe's death. There is no logical justification for the inclusion of these images in a show dedicated to 'Victorian excesses and peccadilloes'. However Smith breezily informed us that she had just read Joyce Carol Oates' Blonde, (a fictional account of Monroe's life) as if that vindicated her haphazard approach.
Episodes: Me and My Shadows, a cycle of photographs of Smith in the company of Sammy Davis JR, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra look-alikes, also seems devoid of relevance to the theme of forensic science and the putative Sickert-Jack the Ripper conjunction. In this work, Smith explained at her walk-about, she attempted to imagine what form the artist's muse might take today. Such twee whimsicality explains the constant loss of focus that makes 'Euphemism' too woolly and diffuse to offer any true intellectual or aesthetic satisfaction.
- Cape based art critic Lloyd Pollak saw 'Euphemism' at the South African
National Gallery, where it opened on April 5 and closed May 22. The show is
currently installed at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg, where it
opened on June 7 and runs until July 9.
