Joburg Short Cuts
by Michael Smith
The ideal conversation between art and art writing would be one in which every artist, irrespective of which stage her/his career was at, could receive critical feedback from the art press. Sadly, this is entirely impossible: art publications are always battling against paucity of funds, time and publication space.
Nonetheless, in an attempt to remedy a situation in which many exhibitions go entirely unmentioned, this month ArtThrob pilots Short Cuts, a series of concise synopses of a number of shows that occurred in the previous month. This month the focus is exclusively on Johannesburg, but ArtThrob hopes to expand this to include other regions in the future.
Karl Gietl at Afronova
Probably one of the most charmless bodies of work to occur in SA painting for a long while. Gietl trips through topics like interracial sex, identity and public urination with all the finesse of a pushy Amway salesman. Gietl's brand of faux naïat;vety seems desperately out of vogue.
Fiona Couldridge at Gordart Gallery
Couldridge blurs the boundaries between sculpture, painting and printmaking with a strong body of work. Taking a sideways glance at issues of child abuse and violence through images derived from prints off dolls' bodies, the show sometimes creaks beneath the weight of morbidity. Yet some lighter moments rescue it, and one emerges looking forward to this peripheral yet consistent painter's next show.
Fritha Langermann at Artspace
An entirely competent yet somewhat plodding and overly-intellectual exploration of issues of symmetry and oxymoron. I blame Willem Boshoff for this brand of dictionary-bothering use of decontextualised words to signal profundity. Nonetheless, Langemann does make some beautiful prints, intense, mandalic endevours that merit sustained looking.
'Exit Ahead Push Trolley Now' at Warren Siebrits
Though Siebrits does have a tendency to retread previously-seen works into new group shows, he still delivers quality exhibitions, and March/April's 'Exit Ahead…' is no exception. The show, in tandem with its handsome companion catalog, timeously critiques the increasing commercialization of the art world, working off French theorist Paul Virillio's assertion that 'people are no longer citizens, they are passengers in transit'.
Some hot curating pits a seminal 1960's Albert Adams image of a figure racked by existential agony (Resurrection) against a new work by Gerhard Marx (Grasses I), to great effect. Elsewhere, Deborah Poynton's intentionally overwrought 'Safety and Security' explores perennial human obsessions on her typical grandiose scale, and Aussie Tracey Moffat's identity-trawling photoplays put in another appearance.
'DKW: New Editions' at David Krut Projects
New images but no real surprises from the likes of Deborah Bell, Colbert Mashile, Diane Victor and others. Printmaking seems to have become the medium in which its acceptable to rehash one's own iconography endlessly, safe in the knowledge that one's profile will secure sales. As usual, however, Victor is the pick of the bunch with her masterful etchings. Does this woman ever sleep? If so, when?
David Goldblatt at Goodman Gallery
Goldblatt's four-decade-spanning record of Johannesburg follows the trajectory of a love affair: initial fascination, creeping disillusionment, ultimate resignation at the immensity of the task. Goldblatt traces the tectonic shifts of money and influence around the city, with the wisdom and authority of one who has been looking very closely for more than forty years. Tillim, Subotzky and Hugo take note.
Pieter Hugo at Warren Siebrits
In a clever yet ultimately vapid problematizing of the medium of photography, Hugo dragged cast members from various Nollywood (the Nigerian equivalent of Hollywood, for the uninitiated) melodramas into his studio and shot them. The questions he raises in the process about the documentary mode and veracity are not as profound as they seem. Yet, the human dimension of this show, the faces, thrift-store costumes, even stretch marks of the actors make it a compelling exercise.
'Spier Contemporary' 2007 at JAG
Big, almost as good as the hype, the Spier Contemporary must have had an acres worth of column inches scribbled about it by now. Yet, no-one seems keen to raise the issue of how utterly awful the painting on the show was. Because the Spier sought to make a decisive shift away from the default conservatism that plagues SA art competitions (see Walter Oltmann beating Sue Williamson in the 2007 Sasol Wax Art Award for positive proof of this), performance and video played strong roles in the final selection: this is as it should be, and reflects contemporary SA art's 'state of the nation'. Yet, that doesn't explain the poor quality of painting on the show. People's exhibit A: the work by Bronwen Findlay. Seemingly an exercise in colliding Abstract Expressionism with flower arranging, the work is aesthetically and conceptually inexplicable. People's exhibit B, Ryan Arenson's confections, similarly do little to allay the fear that SA painting is stuck in a time warp, somewhere between '70's Polke and '80's Julian Schnabel, but on a cute scale. Mathew Brittan's extravagantly-titled series is perhaps more diverting, channeling Blake in a manner that Paul Edmunds described as 'intestinal painting'. And Sanell Aggenbach's 'Siren', while not the strongest work I've seen of hers, was certainly deserving of its spot on the show. But as I wandered around the JAG, the painting I found was soon back to tired idioms and trite concepts: Manfred Zylla's At the Pool must truly be one of the weakest works on the show, a desperately time-bound throwback to the eighties when it was enough to make a big work in charcoal to win a triennial. Themba Shibase's Wena Wendlovu (His Excellency), which takes a pop at African power gone wrong, is a little too Robert Hodgins to be entirely convincing. And Andrzej Nowicki? Don't even get me started...
Spier is a great format that has, and will continue to, shake up established notions of the art award. But his aspect needs consideration if it is to avoid being instrumental in shoving SA painting kicking and screaming into a ghetto of mediocrity.
