Diane Victor and Churchill Madikida at Michael Stevenson
by Linda Stupart
It is said art is a virus
As for aids it surely is!
- Kansi, a Senegalese painter
Succinct, and certainly accurate, this observation doesn't mention that art about AIDS has in fact turned itself into its own kind of ever multiplying, diluting pool of influences. It is difficult and it is brave to make work about AIDS, work that in itself harbours a certain sickness.
If the work is successful, it should be even more difficult to look at than it is to construct, and not necessarily through shock tactics, but rather becasue of its use of emotion, allusion and complexity. In this vein, Churchill Madikida's work functions more successfully than Victor's in its sublimity, sadness and sincerity and, though flawed, presents a sobering and worthwhile break from the usual distancing witticisms and processes so often seen in Cape Town's commercial galleries.
Madikida's exhibition comprises a series of digital prints, an installation that fills the main gallery and two DVD projections sealed off in darkened smaller rooms. Most arresting is his installation, Status, also the show's title, which stands as an overbearing and surprisingly seductive memorial to those who have died of AIDS, in particular the artist's sister who passed away recently.
Status is about death and AIDS, but also, whether intentionally or not, it is about sex, in an entirely dangerous and diseased sort of way. The installation is all coffins, crosses, velvet and red lightrope. In many ways it is reminiscent of Andrew Putter's memorial pieces of the early 90s such as Home is a Place to Die which was full of glam tragedy: sequined skulls, gold syringes and torn photographs of beautiful boys. It is difficult to explain how lights, gold coffins and dried flower crosses can be so saddening, how an installation definitely bordering on kitsch can be so serious and so moving. Perhaps it is because almost every single South African visiting the show knows one person who has died or is, inevitably, going to die of AIDS and thus the memorial candles (which visitors are invited to light) invoke a certain bitterness in the viewer. Or one may, on a less personal and lighter note, remember crying during that final scene of Baz Lurhman's Romeo and Juliet (that scene one also full of neon, coffins and crosses).
Along one side of the main gallery, separated slightly from Madikida's main installation, is a series of 18 smooth white plaster casts taken of the faces of people, many now deceased, with HIV/AIDS. Mounted in a long line across the white gallery wall, they become frighteningly powerful death masks.
Madikida's video piece, Virus shows the HIV cell splitting infinitely until eventually the projection becomes a huge pulsing wall of sick neon dots reflecting the disturbing pace of the spread of both the virus in a human body, and the disease across the population. The second video piece, Nemesis appears to deal with the increase of baby rape in South Africa, allegedly due to a myth that sex with a virgin can cure a man of AIDS. This is heavy stuff, and the video really doesn�t do it justice. It uses lurid colours and seemingly unintentional sloppy editing, showing the caressing of a plastic baby doll, a prop which screams 'bad student film'.
Perhaps letting the side down a little are his large digital Virus prints which show the figure of a nude black man crouching in the psychedelic waves of an HIV cell which again splits as the series progresses. The images are pixellated in a way that looks unintentional, and the prints look a little too much like Trance party flyers to be taken seriously.
In spite of this, I believe that it is useful and challenging to see a cultural producer making work that actually deals with the realities of AIDS as an incurable and fatal disease. If, as Madikida claims, this exhibition aims in part to raise public awareness of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, I think it is a more accurate and effective strategy than running around in 'HIV positive' t-shirt. In addition to this, and importantly so, the artist does not deal with disarming the stigma around those with HIV/AIDS. The title of his exhibition alone suggests that HIV is becoming the great leveller of race, sexual preference and social standing in its cut-and-dry definition of 'status'. Madikida's show is difficult, both to see and to present.
Diane Victor, renowned printmaker, draughtsperson and generally angry and provocative artist, exhibits 'Smoke Portraits' alongside Madikida's heady cenotaph. Victor's series includes 36 portraits apparently sourced from photographs taken by the artist of patients she encountered during her one day visit to the St Raphael HIV/Aids Centre day clinic in Grahamstown.
In describing the fascinating process of her smoke drawings, Victor said, 'The portraits are made with the deposits of carbon from candle smoke on white paper. They are exceedingly fragile and can be easily damaged, disintegrating with physical contact as the carbon soot is dislodged from the paper. I was interested in the extremely fragile nature of these human lives and of all human life, attempting to translate this fragility into portraits made from a medium as impermanent as smoke itself.'
I'm not sure I really need to say more. Victor's portraits are beautiful, delicate and captivating. Using smoke to captivate the transience of human life, however, is extremely obvious and cheesy and wandering round a hospital taking photographs of sick people as a musing on humanity is verging on exploitation. Victor has made some of the most horrifying, engrossing and beautiful drawings and prints that exist in South Africa. She is known to go at all the big issues - sexual repression, racism, AIDS - with a fierce and uncompromising determination. In contrast to what we have come to expect from her, this is very disappointing and a little too easy.
Opens: October 6
Closes: December 3
Michael Stevenson Contemporary Gallery
Hill House, De Smidt Street, Green Point
Tel: 021 421 2575
Fax: 021 421 2578
www.michaelstevenson.com
Hours: Mon - Fri 9am - 5pm, Sat 10am - 1pm
