Avant Car Guard are hungover. Addressing their audience at the BMW Art Talk at the Joburg art fair Jan Henri Booyens, Zander Blom and Michael McGarry look decidedly fragile. A bleary-eyed Booyens begins the talk, listlessly scrolling through photographs of their past work, giving deadpan descriptions of their 2006 book signing performance at Bell-Roberts (which didn't really work as nobody came) and their early attacks on South African conceptualist Kendell Geers ('AVANT CAR GUARD bury J.H.P. 'Kendell' Geers, 1967 ' 1998). After some time, McGarry and Blom gather strength and throw in their two cents worth, admitting that there might be 'some currency' in the idea that their work is shallow and will eventually peter out, but then again maybe not. It's all very noncommittal; true to character, they are not taking it very seriously.

Back in Cape Town, their show 'Volume III', which includes three of the collective's signature text pieces, some posed photographs and new willfully horrid paintings, receives mixed responses. Whilst there are some who are radiant with praise for the art world's irreverent jesters, others dismiss the work as a long-running in-joke lacking in depth. There are also those who feel that the paintings could have been more diabolical, and that the Car Guards have lost their nerve.

Entering the exhibition, the combination of the direly bad Roger Ballen and Fuck Dolphins (2009), a lumpy acrylic painting of a devilish-looking Ballen, with phallic dolphin horns sprouting out of his head, and the wistfully bitchy text piece, Wouldn't it be Awesome if Pieter Hugo was Australian?(2009) at least get me laughing. Happily, whilst both works certainly attack the photographers, whose work can be, and usually is, read as exploitative, there is also a jibe in here for their critics. The allusion to a national prejudice against Australians points perhaps to a jingoistic prejudice against the photographers who we all love to hate.

Elsewhere, it is William Kentridge and Robin Rhode who receive some low blows, this time for their collusion with commerce, rather than their politics. Robin Rhode. Not alone (2009), pictures Rhode as magician/rapstar, boasting top hat, magic wand and white rabbit, and swathed in gold chains. Rhode, whose work has appreciated alarmingly of late and is now commanding astronomical sums internationally, is cast as something of a sellout. A gold chain around his neck bears a BMW emblem, an allusion to Rhode's recent BMW commission Expression of Joy (2009), in which Rhode used a BMW Z4 as a paintbrush on a 100 x 200 m canvas, the performance filmed and co-opted for a BMW advertising campaign.

Even more impertinent though, is the painting's treatment of Kentridge, for the white rabbit, dangling by its ears from Rhode's west coast rapper fingers, has Kentridge's unmistakable eyebrows. The bunny, an overweight, limp-dicked creature clutches a wine bottle like a seasoned alcoholic. The bottle is allededly an allusion to Kentridge's collaboration with Meerlust wine estate, in which the artist created customized wine labels for the winery to raise funds for the production of the artist's Magic Flute opera. This portrayal does seem a touch unfair on Kentridge; after all, if the Meerlust press release is to be believed, the reason for the collaboration with the winery was to fund free matinee performances of Kentridge's 'The Magic Flute' for underprivileged children.

In Poor Man's Picasso (2009), Kentridge takes another hit, as a red-eyed Frankenstein monster, neck shot through with an enormous bolt, the topography of his forehead becoming the site of the iconic 'Hollywood' signpost.

Then again, whilst the commercially successful have much to fear from Avant Car Guard, it is perhaps comforting to know that the less successful are not safe from the boys' bitchy brush either. Keep on Keeping on (2009), a painting of an ornithological poster, labels the flamingos, cranes, parrots and ducks with the names of less internationally successful South African artists, a subtitle painted on the bottom reading 'The B Team'.

In other paintings, the collective manages to issue compliments which ultimately insult. New Goodman owner Liza Essers (The Most Beautiful Girl in the World), soon-to-be-president Jacob Zuma (Why is Zuma so fuckin' hot yo?) and Jane Alexander (Some Girls are bigger than others) (all 2009) each receive double-edged compliments about their attractiveness.

The acrylic paint has been applied with rigor, built up in ugly, opaque layers as only acrylic can be, into an overstated, lumpy plastic surface which references the painterly efforts of high-school students, and also parodies both Kentridge's and Mustafa Maluka's equally layered mark-making. Whilst the surfaces are quite horrid, the paintings produced, as the boys reveal in answer to a question at their BMW art talk, 'like paint-by-numbers' - with one member doing the red bits and another the blue bits - there is evidence in some areas, Roger Ballen's gangrenous teeth, for instance, of an attempt to paint nicely, which rather lets the side down.

Also on show are some new posed photographs. Avant Car Guard waiting for Mandela to die and the nu-rave party experience to hit Johannesburg (2009), pictures the collective hiding out in some garage dressed as right-wing ravers, in luminous camo gear, clutching guns, and along with Avant Car Guard infiltrate the house of art (2009), which sees the trio poking their mud-daubed, leaf-covered faces up through the white floor of the gallery, seems to cast the collective as militant guerillas. 'One for the laydees (2009)' meanwhile pictures the trio posing coyly on a couch.

Whilst 'Volume III' is humorous, it seems there is little to contemplate once one has got the in-joke. Indeed, whilst their downright bitchiness may yet get the boys into trouble, the problem with works such as 'Poor Man's Picasso', is not the content, but the overstatement of it all. As Michael Smith pointed out in a feature on the Joburg Art Fair for our April edition, in comparison to Georgina Gratrix's more subtle painterly jibes directed at the art world, Avant Car Guard's work looks 'overwrought and awkwardly unfunny'. Indeed, while the trio's crude sense of humour is initially refreshing, the repetitive, painfully obvious nature of much of their iconography takes 'Volume III' from the realm of a great joke to a mediocre one.

Opens: March 26
Closes: April 30

Whatiftheworld / Gallery
1st Floor Albert Hall, 208 Albert Road, Woodstock
Tel: (021) 448 1438
Email: info@whatiftheworld.com
www.whatiftheworld.com
Hours: Tue - Fri 10am - 4pm, Sat 10am - 3pm

Images courtesy Whatiftheworld/Gallery and the Artists.