Jacques Coetzer at the Johannesburg Art Gallery
by Michael Smith
How do you call an exhibition 'a show of one-liners' without sounding derogatory? Maybe like this: so much currency is so often given to the speculative artwork that we tend to view its antithesis, the focused, concise artwork as somehow deficient. Yet all the loose threads and nebulous musing that art so often trades as exploration, tend to give one an appetite for works that already know where they are. Jacques Coetzer's 'Alt Pop' at the JAG's Project Room is a show populated by precisely such works.
These one-liners are gems, like beautifully-crafted snippets of Steve Wright-style work-a-day surrealism. Undoubtedly Pop-inspired, they have more in common with works by Claes Oldenburg than those by Warhol or Lichtenstein; a brand of wry humour found only in sculpture informs much of what happens here. Yet Coetzer's works retain an accuracy of social observation sometimes absent from Oldenburg's borderline twee confections.
Coetzer roots his works in South African white experience, enabling them to loop back to cultural phenomena as formally diverse as Bitterkomix and the Afrikaans blues tradition (as exemplified by bands like Jackhammer and Valiant Swart). However, some works have more universal resonance: Dust to Dust is the libidinous black sheep of the Zen garden family: frantic spermatozoa traversing a raked sand surface. Only on closer inspection does one realize that they are moulded out of the sand, paradoxically part of it but separate. The work, with its title, seems to form some sort of radically updated vanitas commentary on the cyclic nature of existence, a notion reinforced by the circular steel container which contains the sand. Like much else here, it is an exercise in elevation: it raises the status of that genre of elaborate sand sculpture one sees at Durban beachfront around holiday season.
Forever Young extends this trope of Coetzer's work into the realm of fully-fledged reclamation. A Chopper bicycle, circa 1970's, resplendent in emerald green and faux chrome, is caught in a perpetual wheelie, its rider long gone or grown up. The dream of eternal youth referenced by the work's title and the reckless abandon of the wheelie seem attainable for a brief moment as this bike, once a prized possession of a boy again achieves apotheosis in the adults' world. Coetzer found this treasure and restored it to its former glory, and there's something wonderfully obtuse about such a process: he light-heartedly inhabits the role of a 'manly man', the kind prone to trawling scrapyards for forgotten classic cars to rescue and restore. Gently sending up this kind of arch-masculine pursuit, Coetzer nevertheless elicits from this exercise a tender comment on the purpose and workings of nostalgia.
Yet it is with Rock Steady that his social observation hits full stride: a Fender electric guitar amplifier has been rebuilt in the shape of a Christian cross. For one of the openings of this travelling show, Coetzer even got Piet Botha of Jackhammer to play guitar through this amplifier, proving that it is still fully functional. To 'hotrod' a fetishized object so radically yet retain its function is to try to imprint an intensified version of its original identity onto it.
While European and American artists (Mike Kelley, Gavin Turk) fall over themselves to lasso classic punk's power and street cred in various projects, this work unashamedly references heavy metal of the embarrassingly pseudo-satanic type: AC/DC, Mötorhead, Black Sabbath, some of the so-called 'gods of rock'. Coetzer seems to revel in the decidedly un-PC pallor of this subgenre.
The work cheekily equates the mythologies of Christianity and heavy rock, astutely observing that their apparently opposed adherents share an enthusiastic devotion to cults of personality, and an endless capacity for blind adulation. Still, I'm trying unsuccessfully to imagine one of those 'funky for Jesus' praise-and-worship bands hauling this out of a tour bus and onto the Rhema stage.
Paradise Lost, a beautifully carved serpent's head on the end of a standard-issue garden hose, similarly deals in religious imagery, this time put to secular use. The inevitable implication of this work is that the white South African suburban idyll has been sullied by threats from the other side of the wall. This is borne out by a short, concise little video work. Presented in a gold-framed LCD screen, Cluster Park pairs up rhythmically edited footage of high-density townhouse developments (filmed around Tshwane and Midrand) with some lazy acoustic blues. My almost automatic association of blues with American prison movies made this an incisive comment about middle-class South Africans trading the suburban paradise for lives of fear and paranoia behind the walls of gated communities.
Possibly the most amusing, and simultaneously chilling work is This Side Up. A cardboard box in the shape of a full-size coffin lies rather matter-of-factly on the ground. Visible on one of its sides are two arrows indicating which way is up. The work asserts the banality, the utter ordinariness of death, in a manner not dissimilar to Ron Mueck's Dead Dad. The placement of this work directly across from Dust to Dust means that Coetzer allows the simplicity of his individual works to be balanced by their openness to dialogue amongst themselves. Yet on its own, This Side Up is the work that stayed with me long after I'd left the space: something about it being so simple, so unambiguous made it one of the strongest single works I've seen in a while.
Coetzer is acutely aware that jokes become the parts of casual conversation where difficult topics like sex and death are spoken about. Yet just below the enacted bravado lies a preoccupation with the visceral reality of these issues, something he continuously allows to seep through, to great effect.
Opened: February 9
Closed: March 25
The Project Room at the Johannesburg Art Gallery
Klein Street, Joubert Park, Johannesburg
Tel: (011) 725 3130/ 80 / 81
Email: job@joburg.org.za
Hours: Tue - Sun 10am - 5pm
