Alison Kearney's 'Portable Hawkers' Museum' at JAG
by Robyn Sassen
The notion of a portable museum is very European. It's also very 19th century. Marcel Broodthaers tossed it about in his work, as did Marcel Duchamp, to say nothing of Walter Benjamin in his aphoristic collector and flâneur characters. The notion of hawkers earning their bread selling cheap consumables is very contemporary urban South African. Alison Kearney has melded these two ostensibly disparate concepts.
Duchamp's Boîte Verte (1943) was a nifty valise in which he gave miniaturised immortality to all he had done. In replicating his art, and offering the replica as art, the atom of the original artwork was split. The brilliance of miniaturisation is in its resultant portability. From the late 1960s Broodthaers gave voice to the play between art and not-art, museum environment and not-museum environment, taking the mickey out of taxonomies of the museum and resting on Magritte's premise Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
From the outset, Kearney's 'Retrospective Hawkers' Museum' is charming in its directness. The tiny X gallery, behind Zayd Minty's 'Place like Home' and the SABC's corporate show, is ideal for this installation: it's just a pity the gallery staff don't seem sufficiently motivated to get the show on the road for visitors. None of the video works were running when I was there.
Kearney began 'The Hawkers' Museum' in 2003. Game-like in its idiosyncratic nature, on one level it is about the purchase of items from hawkers. The rule of this game is that each item cannot cost more than R10. The practice of it is that each item is not only displayed in a museum format, but is also photographed and replicated cast in Plaster of Paris, and exhibited as such.
So we see snuff in small plastic vessels, foot scourers and Spiderman figurines, matchboxes and hairclips, nick-nacks and doo-dads. Things you need and things your children will demand, because they're sparkly and bright and novel. They look cheap and loud and crude. Cast in Plaster of Paris or photographed, they become noble and iconic. Their status and roots have become enriched, enhanced, sullied, perhaps, by museumification.
Like Duchamp, Kearney is recognising the integrity of the commonplace and raising its value to something that oddly straddles values of expectation. Like Broodthaers, she acknowledges the commodity status of art at the root of her work and manifests a sensitive consciousness of the present. Like Benjamin, she understands the potency of being able to capture the essence of a time, a place, a reality, through fragments, quotes and notes. Uniquely, she has taken possession of the gesture.
'The Hawkers' Museum' began in South Africa. Kearney took it to Switzerland on a residency, developing it, honing it, exposing it. Now it's back. It's tighter, more conscious of museum rules, wittier than ever but also more sensitive to its humble roots.
Kearney appears in the photographs of her work in performance. Her hair is tied back in a ponytail, her skirt demurely knee-length, her shoes sensible. She clutches her scuffed leather suitcase, traipsing around cities in Europe. She resonates mysteriously with a character in a 19th century novel. A young woman traveller: independent, alone, a foreigner, an émigrée, perhaps even a refugee.
But then she stops. She opens her suitcase and shows her wares to passersby. She is not aiming to sell things, but to show them. Suddenly she's no longer a young woman traveller, alone, slightly vulnerable: she's a sideshow. She's a museum on legs.
Kearney succeeds in treating the two spaces of the X gallery in completely different ways and the effect of this is to dignify the hawkers' trade, and to raise their petty wares to a level of celebration. She is not only doing this for the hawkers, though, and has consolidated this in an exhibition more visually exciting than the large installation at Basel last year and at The Premises Gallery in Braamfontein before that.
'This portable museum comments on the politics of existing museum practices and how value is attached to objects within contemporary culture, through the kinds of objects it houses and the ways in which the collection is displayed,' she says, 'The collection is exhibited in open public spaces, while 'documents' or 'representations' of the items belonging to the museum collection are exhibited within galleries. The gallery is thus denied its relationship to the original work of art.'
This honing down of material, this capricious play with museum taxonomies and rules, these beautiful photographs of relics of the hawkers in Johannesburg, are beguilingly simple reflections on a complex set of values. 'Because of their indexical relationship to the people and place from which the items in the museum collection were bought,' she comments in her artist's statement, 'the museum pays homage to the hawkers of Johannesburg whose lives have, in many instances, been negatively affected by the city of Johannesburg's restructuring programme.'
Closes: March 9
Johannesburg Art Gallery
Cnr. Klein and King George Streets, Joubert Park
Tel: (011) 725 3130/80/81
Fax: (011) 720 6000
Email: kearneya@hse.pg.wits.ac.za
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