Joachim Schönfeldt at Gallery AOP
by Cara Snyman
The imposing presence of Joachim Schönfeldt's lioness of Untitled: Roar, is not easily forgotten. Shown at Art on Paper in 2006, having travelled with Okwui Enwezor's 'Mirror's Edge' from 1999, the slick feline played a fine game transgressing the rules of curio and fine art object production. Laboured and lacquered to perfection, the sculpture's high gloss kitschy appeal, combined with its monumentality, rendered it an instant icon. The lion as symbol is ever popular in insignia and symbols of national pride, and the proud lioness felt distinctly nationalistic, even fascist in its rendering, perhaps a wry comment on the monstrous effects of misdirected power and excessive pride.
Schönfeldt's latest offering, 'A show for Sheldon Cohen', at Gallery AOP (formerly Art on Paper) again features his majestic three-headed beasts. Cat's Eyes is a three-headed lion with each of its heads in regal poise, mirroring the lioness of Untitled: Roar. The wood here, however, is left bare, or stripped, much like the lion itself, who has lost its airs, its monumentality, its symbolic power. And how could it maintain its dignity with wig-like baby blue mane, complete with perfectly symmetrical curls? The colour contrasts between the reddish brown wood, blue mane, yellow glazed circles painted on the lion's side, and the warm pink wall behind it, further adds a retro, campy aesthetic to the work that intentionally undermines the potential of the lion as grand symbol.
In speech bubbles on either side of its body is painted 'what they say', and 'and how things are', and Cat's Eyes seems to stand for an inconsistency of sort, a fissure between two modes of understanding. The large cracks in the body of the sculpture add to this idea, and are accentuated with blood-red filler, alluding to veins, tears, breaks in the skin. The animal here is a scarred battle ground, a vehicle of opposing ideologies.
There is a distinctly violent undertone to the show - maybe not surprising considering the dedication. Cohen, who had been CEO of Amalgamated Appliances until stepping down soon before his murder, was shot and killed in January 2008, apparently for just a cellphone. He was aged 46. Like many similar murders, Cohen's is possibly emblematic of the senselessness of much criminal violence in current South Africa.
This theme is most overt in Maquette 3, where a long-bodied, fat-bellied and stumpy-legged cow stands ankle deep in 'blood'. The ill-defined shape of Schönfeldt's cow/lion head seems to be both muzzled and wailing. Alarmed and strained by its weight and condition, the animal suggests all sorts of vague horrors.
A series of drawings copied from an ancient Assyrian work further enforces the theme with the depiction of a scaled lion in its dying throes. Its attacker is noticeably absent, represented only by the spears that pierce the lion's skin.
There is also an implied violence in the monstrous physiognomy of the figures, and while Schönfeldt's three-headed beasts show no signs of Dr Frankenstein's needle, they are no less disconcerting as perversions of nature. Inherent in their conception is an idea of deviance from a natural order. This is echoed in the inverted pyramid shape of the maquette for Moo, Roar, Chee-ow, Yeeoh, that has a cow on top of a lion resting on an eagle standing on a peafowl. Both seem based on an imposed structure, a genetic modification: an image of man asserting a twisted dominance over the natural world.
The laboriousness of Schönfeldt's process, with single pieces often taking years to complete, might well add to the weight of these works. Their immobility is stressed by a painfully slow rendered video work, entitled Moo, Moo, Moo, where a panicked three-headed cow attempts to flee oncoming danger, only to end up in a mangled heap of too many heads and legs.
The storyboard drawings animated in the video are also on display, but, similarly to Schönfeldt's anatomical sketches of cows, seem a bit like filler. 'A show for Sheldon Cohen' contains only one finished work, and while some maquettes add substantially to the show, much of the work feels like supplementary material intended to buffer the financial risk of showing one sculpture priced at several hundred thousand Rand.
It has been suggested that Schönfeldt's work is a critique of art world sensibilities and a comment on the often fraught relationship between art and commerce. Rory Bester¹ in a memorable essay on the significance of the R 1.5 million price tag of 'Roar', discusses the issue of supply and demand, art world pragmatism and the glass ceiling of the South African pricing structure. One cannot but see 'A show for Sheldon Cohen' as a continuation of that narrative.
The catalogue essay squarely places the emphasis on Schönfeldt's drawing, and considering that the drawings on display are not particularly interesting, it seems an overcompensation of sorts.
Equally, the central placement of the maquette for Moo, Roar, Chee-ow, Yeeoh, the work commissioned by Enwezor and shown with massive media attention at the Gwangju Bienale in South Korea, feels strategic. It does not work particularly well as a stand alone sculpture, but that is hardly the point. As Sean O' Toole remarks in an article in The Financial Mail² , 'For the shrewd collector, Gallery AOP... is selling a wooden Marquette(sic) of the work [Moo, Roar, Chee-ow, Yeeoh]. Act fast: Dietrich Mateschitz, the billionaire founder of Red Bull, is mulling over buying another Schönfeldt sculpture for his collection.'
Gallery pragmatism would not be an issue if 'A show for Sheldon Cohen' was a coherent or resolved body of work, but one feels some editing might have been in order. Schönfeldt's finely crafted works are often successful in isolation, but have trouble relating to each other; some even seem like mere repetition. The exhibition reads better if one considers the gallery as a project space: 'A show for Sheldon Cohen' is essentially a work-in-progress show, rather than a solo exhibition, and it might be unfair to criticize it as the latter.
Opens: September13
Closes: October 4
GALLERY AOP (Art on Paper Gallery)
44 Stanley Avenue, Braamfontein Werf (Milpark), Johannesburg
Tel: (011) 726 2234
Email: info@artonpaper.co.za
Hours: Tue - Sat 10am - 5pm
1 'Roar Against Silence', by Rory Bester, published in Art South Africa, vol 5.1, Spring 2006
2 'The lamp bearers', by Sean O'Toole, published in The Financial Mail, September 19, 2008
