Taylor Rain is Dirty Girl in Velvet Aryan Kaganof at the KZNSA
by Peter Machen
Aryan Kaganof occupies a unique position on the South African art landscape. A prolific producer of poetry, novels, films and fine art, he has a small band of committed devotees and a similar number of critics who see him as something of a con man. The truth, as is usually the case, lies somewhere in between. Kanagof is certainly capable of producing moments of profound intensity and even on occasion transcendent beauty. But he is also the man who throws shit at the wall and sees what sticks. In a sense, all artists, writers and other 'creatives' do this all the time. But it is usually a private process. Kaganof makes that private space public, which is an interesting proposition. But he does have a lot of shit flying through the air, and I'm not entirely sure that the artist himself is capable of initiating quality control.
For all his ponderousness and poetry, the bulk of Kananof's output is conceptually lightweight, dressed up in edge and accessorised with a specific brand of gothic that came only from 1980s South Africa. The feeling of substance comes from controversy and the fact that virtually anything – well anything representational at least – is allowed into an art gallery these days.
Now I'm perfectly fine with this fact. My own conception of art certainly doesn't exclude even the violently pornographic; it doesn't necessarily exclude anything, really. And as an artist, Kaganof is certainly allowed to play with this notion that anything goes, and also with the idea that criticism of hard-core work can be so easily deflected with words such as 'Calvinism' and 'conservatism'. But as someone who is charged with reviewing his work, I am certainly allowed to call his bluff.
And so, if I'm to be honest – and it would be easier not to be – I've always felt that Kaganof's real artistic product is not his work but his self: the notion of Kaganof as the artist, the writer, the performer, the grand entertainer, always bending into the arc of fiction. I see him as raconteur-as-artist, and on occasion, also as ringmaster, for he certainly does like a circus; he has exactly that kind of slightly dark charisma. And unlike many people in the art community, I find him to be very likeable. That, said, my feelings about his previous work remain consistent with Taylor Rain is Dirty Girl in Velvet, his latest short film, which premiered at Grahamstown, and recently showed in the KZNSA Gallery.
With an electronic soundtrack from edgy US minimalists Matmos, this film, which lasts just over 11 minutes, begins with squelchy porn sounds blending with Matmos's music. After two minutes some text starts to appear, cut-up poetry that moves mostly at a speed that is just readable. There's a fragmented narrative inside the text that maintains a tenuous relationship with the layered soundtrack. Then, after six minutes, we are introduced to the adorable – okay, pretty hot – Taylor Rayne and her somewhat elasticated anus and vulva. We get to know Miss Rain fairly intimately as she fingers her asshole with controlled enthusiasm. The poetry then returns, stampeding through a frame in the screen in close proximity to said anus. Rain then, in classic porn style, changes positions, partially perhaps so we can get another view, but mostly I think in aid of her auto-penetration. The tension, such as there is, arises from the possibility that Taylor Rayne might or might not manage to get her entire fist up there. One finger, two fingers, three fingers, four…and…that's it. Sorry to spoil the plot.
In summary, the work feels like a fridge magnet session interspliced with some hardcore masturbation porn; which is basically what it is. The resulting cut-up stream of consciousness is too littered with the iconic and the poetic, the words that are used and the ways in which they are used empty themselves with overuse. I am unfortunately not familiar with the work of the respected poet Gary Cummisky on whose poem April in the Moon-Sun the work is based, so I don't know to what extent Kaganof has re-cut it. Regardless, although much of it was engaging, it wasn't exactly spellbinding.
Kaganof's utter refusal to rein things in – to exercise intellectual control – might be the key to his art, but it is also his major weakness. There is a far more intelligent and interesting work lurking in ...Velvet, and I think that Aryan Kaganof would be the perfect man to make it. But he'd have to work harder, and more than anything, carefully digest the notion that this is a world in which William Burroughs and Andy Warhol have already lived and died and changed our lives in innumerable ways. We should be doing them proud, without feeling any compulsion to stand on their shoulders. With Kaganof's work, there is that Fanonian feeling that everything has indeed already been said. But while that might be true of history and politics, in art – and in life – there is new everywhere, always. I think Kaganof might agree with me in conversation, but his work suggests something else, a combination of art school innocence and jaded arrogance.
For those Kaganof fans – and fans he does have – who read this review and think that I just don't understand his avant-garde, I'd like to be pre-emptive and say that perhaps that's not the case. If anything, with ...Velvet Kaganof doesn't go close enough to the real edge, the visceral one that is composed not of a global archive of words and images that is capable of disturbing any Mother Grundy, but one that engages with a real world that is far more offensive than anything Kaganof has produced.
And while I do think that much of his work does exist as a critique of the offensiveness of the real world and all its vile imbalances, he needs to work harder and beat his own drum with a little more substance and a little less bravado if he is to convince others that he is not the huckster many proclaim him to be.
Peter Machen is a Durban-based writer and artist
Opens: August 5
Closes: August 24
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