Brenden Gray at gordart Gallery's Project Room
by Michael Smith
In our fledgling democracy, the issue of access is one of many nodes of theory that is receiving due attention. Access to jobs, access to reasonable education, access to housing and, chiefly, access to all strata of an apparently booming economy, all seem to be, in one way or another, on the public agenda. Young Johannesburg artist Brenden Gray believes that one area not receiving nearly enough focus is access to the construction and re-presentation of our immediate history and the 'culture' it implies.
Taking the events that transpired on a visit to the Apartheid Museum's as a starting point, Gray's 'Free for All' comprises intaglio prints that interrogate a number of ideas and images related to this landmark. The Apartheid Museum was presumably built as an uniting rebuttal to the myriad divisive, brutalising museums and monuments that concretised the aggression of the apartheid era. Gray's show seeks to establish a dialogue with an audience cowered by a horrific past into submissive acceptance of the commodified version of triumph over that past which, he believes, the Museum actually represents.
While on an outing with students (Gray is also a lecturer at The Design Centre in Greenside, Johannesburg), he incurred the wrath of the security at the Apartheid Museum by attempting to take photographs of some sections of the permanent exhibition. Informed that taking photographs was 'not allowed', he demanded to engage with the management over this issue. This then yielded the explanation that the images and sections of the exhibition could not be photographed as they were controlled by copyright. Access to a process of rewriting history was thus essentially denied, and Gray was told to simply consume and not participate.
The aberration of a culture seeking to solidify its history into a series of static poses, which are in turn controlled by copyright, seemed to Gray to be entirely at odds with the kind of freedom achieved through fluid struggle and resistance which the Museum purported to symbolize. This becomes the subject of the works on the show: as the revolution coagulates into orthodoxy, it is the task of the artist to challenge this selective re-presentation of history with images that talk back.
The works on 'Free for All' adopt a kind of tongue-in-cheek reworking of Resistance Art-era printmaking aesthetics, a là Kentridge, Victor and Bell. It is a calculation, a subtlety of strategy that throws the anger of Gray's mark-making and general compositional approach into sharp relief. That Gray is endlessly resourceful at activating the surfaces of his etching plates is more than evident from the works on show, and backed up by the comments of veteran printmaker Kim Berman in the guest book.
However, walking around the show it becomes clear that this is no mere formal game. Gray's anger at the machinations of the new system, and the blind consent of the populace on which it capitalises, seems genuine. Here a security guard becomes a caricature-like cipher of power, there a landscape is threatened by an ominous, amorphous apparition. Words and symbols float as if trying to escape the Baudrillardian absurdity of it all, emotive yet ineffectual in their isolation. The word 'terror', so indexical to our global culture and Zeitgeist right now, comes unmoored and seems to suggest the emotional bullying tactics of a museum desperate to regain for its sponsors some credibility. The visual nature of a word like this, which dominates the composition in which it features, links to the domination of the landscape around The Apartheid Museum by billboards publicising the adjacent Gold Reef City casino. The two institutions share a symbiotic existence, with the Apartheid Museum being like an act of up-front contrition to preemptively absolve the excesses of the casino. Thus the word 'terror' in an exhibition functions as manipulatively as the word 'winner' would on a casino advertisement.
As I leave the small, energized venue of gordart Gallery's Project Room, a small motif on the work Tour catches my eye: two parallel arrowheads, both facing left, float in a small blank area, an iconic respite from the furious mark-making everywhere else. Given his politics, I wonder if Gray is suggesting a truer shift to the left than the one offered by the Apartheid Museum. Only as I drive away do I remember that the arrowheads are of the type printed on CD and DVD players. And facing to the left, they mean 'replay'...
Opens: August 16
Closes: September 1
The Project Room, gordart Gallery
78 Third Avenure, Melville, Johannesburg
Tel: (011) 726 8519
Email: gordon@gordartgallery.com
www.gordart.co.za
Hours: Tue - Sat 10.30am - 6pm
