Bruce Nauman and Charles Atlas at the Michaelis Galleries
by Linda Stupart
If you were lurking around the inner city campus of the Michaelis School of Fine Art recently, you might be forgiven for thinking that the university students were preparing for a very rudimentary grammar exam, with everyone conjugating verbs with gleeful abandon.
The reason for this unusual behaviour is the on-campus exhibition of Bruce Nauman's 1985 video piece, Good Boy Bad Boy, whose appearance, with Charles Atlas' TEACH in this little academic corner of Africa has alternately, and vehemently, been touted as a major coup and a total waste of time.
After Brian Eno's recent appearance in the Michaelis Gallery, it seems logical, and encouraging, to follow on with one of the pioneers of video art - Bruce Nauman. The work, although dated, is still an interesting introduction to the mechanics and possibilities of the medium. The debate around the work, however, lies in the question of relevance. What exactly does Good Boy Bad Boy have to offer Cape Town in 2007?
The work conmprises two screens, each showing an actor repeating a series of 100 phrases: platitudes, value judgements and seemingly meaningless and sometimes contradictory assertions. The actors, one an older white librarian-esque lady and the other a cool black moustachioed man smoking a cigarette throughout, begin the texts simultaneously. As they continue to speak, however, the changes in pace, annunciation and emphasis mean that the two videos become more and more out of synch. While it is almost impossible to listen to the texts spoken by both voices simultaneously, half caught fragments of the assertions of our man on screen B begin to lend different meanings to the monologue of the woman on screen A.
This seemingly benign series of phrases finds its meaning precisely in the varying pronunciations and emphases of the speakers. 'It was good' takes on a lecherous, sultry quality after 'I am a good boy/ You are a good boy/ We are Good Boys', changing the viewer's perception of those that come before.
Nauman's notorious language play is exemplified in this piece, as each sentence and its qualifier - good, bad, shit, hat - become a term to be stretched, morphed, questioned and consumed. Spoken word, and the text at its root, is exposed for the malleable, non-static construction that it is - each sentence changing what the speaker implies.
Though the piece is fun and playful, like many other Nauman pieces, it exposes the banal as something that is complex and potentially dangerous. The video ends disturbingly, summing up the previous assertions, the need for platitudes, qualifiers, and the need to speak itself:
'I don't want to die/ You don't want to die/ We don't want to die/ This is fear of death.'
That said (and similar comments have been made many times about a piece that is 20 years old), why do we need to see this decidedly 80s, in many ways dated work, by a bastion of white maleness, in a university in South Africa today?
A very different kind of video piece, and one that perhaps answers the question slightly better, is Charles Atlas' TEACH. Entrenched as so many South African artists (particularly performance artists) are in issues of gender, identity and the gaze, the actions of the video's subject Leigh Bowery, with whom TEACH is a collaboration of sorts, seem to have been excluded from much of our micro art canon. Similarly, Atlas, a pioneer of various kinds of performance and film, is rarely mentioned in regard to his influence on our own performers in the throes of various identity crises.
The aforementioned Bowery was an infamous dancer, performer and defining club kid of the 80s. Seven foot tall without his platforms, and covered in piercings, makeup and fantastical gender-indifferent costumes, Bowery spewed his beautiful, terrible narcissism all over the performance and art worlds. In Atlas' piece, Bowery's head appears, heavily made up with metal rods piercing his cheeks. Bowery holds grotesquely enlarged soft plush lips to his mouth, and lip synchs (as well as possible with his piercings) to Aretha Franklin's Take a Look:
'Take a look in the mirror
Look at yourself
But don't you look too close
'Cause you just might see
The person that you hate the most.
Here Atlas reflects wryly on the complexities and hazards of exuberant costume and performance, as well as the simultaneous construction and demolition of identity through drag and disguise. Famous, in part, as the vulnerable subject of a number of Lucian Freud paintings, Bowery's performance questions the viewers' gaze towards him as 'freak', all the while exposing his vulnerability at the hands of his own masochistic meanderings.
TEACH too functions as a memorial to Bowery, who died of Aids in 1994. Particularly when viewed in the same exhibition as Nauman's piece, it's hard not to see Bowery's performance as one last mournful exultation of life. Perhaps this, in fact, is fear of death.
Atlas' piece then is integral to the art-in-the-time-of-Aids canon, one that is particularly relevant to South Africa. And, more than that, Atlas is a vital influence for global and South African performance and video artists dealing with issues of gender, queer theory and performativity. The work of Stephen Cohen, for example, comes to mind.
Why then is this exhibition useful, why is it relevant? I think the answer to these questions is simply 'Because we've never seen it before'. Stuck in an art-information black hole throughout so much of Modernism and the beginnings of both the Conceptual movement and Postmodernism, the South African artworld has never seen this work and often forgets its relevance as a contextual framework. In essence, Bruce Nauman and Charles Atlas' presence in a university-based gallery is a helpful one, I feel. Bring us the alleged 'greatest living artists' of the world: I believe that we can handle them. It's about time.
Opened: May 8
Closed: May 18
Michaelis Galleries
Hiddingh campus, Orange Street, Cape Town
Tel: (021) 480 7111
Email: Lisa.Essex@uct.ac.za
Hours: Mon - Fri 10am - 4pm
