Chad Rossouw

Current Review(s)

A History of Failure

Chad Rossouw at Brundyn + Gonsalves

Remember the furore when the de la Rey number reemerged a couple of years ago? At the time, the Department of Arts and Culture acknowledged the composer’s right to free speech, warning however of the tune’s subversive potential. Interesting: that line between subversion and critical potential. And it is the de la Ray which has once again surfaced as a vehicle of critique – a float, as it were, upon which to suspend what Chad Rossouw’s exhibition calls ‘A History of Failure’. 

The young Rossouw (writer, lecturer and artist – the order given by his exhibition pamphlet) is a recent graduate of Michaelis, UCT, and the exhibition was submitted in part towards his Masters thesis there. As Rossouw’s first solo show with the Brundyn + Gonsalves gallery, there is a certain irony to his chosen title, allowing little room for expectation or the possibility of underachievement. Indeed it is the imminence of an Icarus landing which greets the viewer in the artist’s The Union of South Africa (2011).

20 March 2012 - 02 May 2012

Listings(s)

'A History of Failure'

Chad Rossouw at Brundyn + Gonsalves

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task, young man, and possibly a tragic one.
    – Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (1943)

'A History of Failure' uses South Africa’s past to examine both the complex nature of history and of South African identity. Using a variety of media, including lithographs, sculpture and found objects, Rossouw shows moments of melancholy, bathos and bombastic failure against the relentless march of historical time. Two main ideas connect the various artworks in 'A History of Failure'. The first is that historical progress is merely an illusion. The second proposes an inherent failing in projects, monuments or nations that are dependent on the illusion of history.

The Union of South Africa, for example, presents a railway (a symbol of progress and imperial ownership of land) spiraling to the ceiling with a model train teetering on the brink of disaster. Other works, such as The De La Rey, invent fictional histories, in this case the development and destruction of a South African Zeppelin in the 1930s. Here history is a tale told from mutable evidence.

20 March 2012 - 02 May 2012