Marcel Waldeck's 'Burn Out' tears up The Premises Gallery
I got lost once driving around Pretoria West, searching for the Pretoria Technikon. Given that the houses all looked the same, in the 'Agter Elke Man' style of railway architecture, I decided, in what I believed to be an inspired piece of male navigation, to use the �doughnuts� burnt into the road by boy racers, as landmarks. That was until I realised that every road had an almost identical round rubber marking burnt into it.
Marcel Waldeck brought this world into the art gallery this month, as he orchestrated a performance of superbike riders creating drawings out of 'burn outs' (rear tire spins, also known as 'doughnuts') on blank slabs in the Premises Gallery. The bikers, from the Stallion Riders club, participated in this performance under the leadership of Waldeck and Clive Lewis, one of the founding members of the club. Utilising the activity of motorbike riding as a metaphor for power, freedom and the sublime, Waldeck endeavoured to shift this (sub)cultural phenomenon into the context of art.
