'Collaborations: An Exhibitions of Young Artists' at The Wolmarans Gallery
by Michael Smith
I know this is hugely twee, but every time I venture out of the suburbs into Jozi's inner city, I think of Petula Clark's rousing 60's classic Downtown, and laugh at how far its evocation of the urban idyll is from 21st century reality. Lately I've had more and more opportunities to dust off our Pet's anthem as I beat a path to various venues, some established but many ad hoc, at which artists are choosing to show.
It's particularly exciting when young artists and students invade dormant CBD spaces. As one heads to these spots, thoughts of catching first glimpse of a 'Freeze'-style coup d'etat of the local art world by bright young things pop into your head; maybe there will be a pathologically self-revealing Emin, or a deadpan Hume on the painting front, or even a quasi-yob Hirst knock-off masterminding the whole thing. Inevitably, though, these are necessarily fruitless hopes, because this is not Britain at the turn of the last decade, and movements into and around the Johannesburg art world don't seem to be executed with nearly as much tabloid-calibre hype or conservative-baiting self-aggrandizement. Well, not since Kendell Geers moved, anyway� Rather, the immediate and more broadly geographical spaces in which these shows operate form integral parts of their conceptual terrain, not simply backdrops for new versions of cool.
In the case of 'Collaborations: an exhibition of young artists', a sense of the importance of the choice and use of space was arguably the most significant and sophisticated element in the show, (barely) holding together the disparate aesthetic and conceptual areas explored by participating artists. All from Wits, the students involved in this show were encouraged by means of a fairly smart curatorial brief to make work in collaboration with peers from different disciplines, and even from academic areas outside of visual arts. Thus, writers, law students, even business undergrads participated on some level in the production of works made specifically for the show, and outside of academic requirements. This is significant in itself, as visual arts became the central player in interdisciplinary collaboration, rather than fulfill its usual role of decorative add-on. However, in real terms, the results of this curatorial fulcrum varied, and the show was ultimately uneven and lacked cohesion.
The installation Aber, by Gina van Zyl de Oliviera, Catherine McLaughlin, Michele Alisio, Jono Sheen, Alex Maisto and Beth Shirley, was a case in point. A loose affiliation of objects, images and medical paraphernalia littered an undesignated section of the venue's main space, and a title card endeavoured to pull things together by stating that the work was an 'Assimilation of abandoned works, idea of patching together - medical, fixing what you are given. In German "aber" means "but", a contradiction'. A fairly sound observation of the idea of contradiction and indecision though this card gave, the work ultimately lacked the chops to pull it off. The fact that the title card heralded the inclusion of the Med students raised my hopes that the work would access the deep morass of issues that makes up healthcare in SA right now, or consider concepts of ethical gravity like stem cell research, cloning or even HIV/Aids. If any of these were being dealt with, they remained undetected, as the work's blunt aesthetics failed to reveal much beyond a Jonathan Meese-style neo-Arte Povera anti-slickness.
Ill-mannered frivolity and Contrived, a pair of video projections produced by Anthea Pokroy, Caryn Janit and Megan Shulman, felt a bit forced. Billed as 'modern re-workings of the classic children's fairytales Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood', the works purported to 'recreate and, indeed, reassess the archetypal reading and surface interpretations of the fairytale'. Presumably, Shulman's experience as a law student informed the manner in which this happened: the characters played by a street-smart fairytale heroine, were depicted in a defendant's box, answering unheard questions about their respective stories. The work came off like a quaint 'culture-jamming for girls' experiment; the very idea of trying to reinterpret fairytales in an edgy manner was limp, even misdirected, as it assumed a position of power for fairytales that they no longer possess. When reinterpretations operate best they are insightful in terms of what they choose to subvert or 'reassess'; you'd have to go a long way to convince me that fairytales are the grand narratives or formative mythologies they used to be.
Elsewhere, moments of power were achieved. The shrill oppression of Phillip Johnson and Nicole Levenberg's Green Drawing, a soccer field condensed into a room, became a fun yet compelling counterpoint to the burgeoning 2010 hysteria. This work literally utilised the space it occupied by extending the soccer pitch up the walls, cleverly disrupting the linear matrix of football, and also possibly the binary mindset it engenders. One of the curators of the show, Anthea Pokroy, told me that a group of schoolchildren visiting the show interacted with this work and its many soccer balls in a manner that adults did not, which means that the work was powerful beyond its conceptual dimension.
A strong series of small-scale works appeared in one of the spaces. Produced by Nathan Jansen van Vuuren and Anthea Pokroy, they were a subtle comment on the interrelationships between photography and painting. Moody black and white photographs of domestic interiors had semi-translucent, Bacon-esque ink and charcoal figures floated over them. The conversation set up between the reprographic image and the autographic mark, while not fully resolved, was exciting and held potential for further exploration in future projects. A diverting, if possibly unintentional, dimension of this work resulted from its content of space. The juxtaposition of the obviously suburban spaces in the photographs with the shabby, almost derelict institutional interior of the Wolmarans Gallery registered the differences and tensions between experiences of interiors in Johannesburg's vast suburbia with those in the inner city. The works operated almost like a reversal of Guy Tillim's photographs of inner city squalor in red-line buildings in Johannesburg: Tillim's works function like an ethnography of poverty, taking images of neglect into privileged spaces like art galleries and corporate collections. Jansen van Vuuren and Pokroy's works necessitated the viewer's presence in the inner city, and as such the images read like investigations of aspiration and suburban paranoia.
The key to growth for this thread of organising and curating will be greater selectivity. Still, the organisers and curators are to be lauded for the initiative they have shown and their willingness to engage in a logistical task that would scare off most established gallerists.
Opened: May 10
Closed: May 16
Wolmarans Gallery
9 Wolmarans Street, Braamfontein, Johannesburg
Tel: Anthea 082 497 2159
Email: antheapokroy@gmail.com
