ArtThrob News, Reviews and Listings Updates

Unnatural History and Natural Selection

2012-02-01T00:00:00+02:00

In June 2009, during the preview week of the Venice Biennale, when social prestige is as much a subject of scrutiny as the new art on display, I saw Guardian art critic Adrian Searle in comfortable running shoes strolling through the Arsenale, with a cameraman and microphone operator in tow. He was reviewing ‘Making Worlds’, Daniel Birnbaum’s curated exhibition, or at least analysing it, or possibly just commenting on it – it is hard to name this curious species of web-enabled criticism. A day later, I logged onto the Guardian’s website. 'And here we have the knitting club,' quipped Searle, never breaking stride as he passed Moshekwa Langa’s installation, Temporal Distance (With Criminal Intent). You Will Find Us in the Best Places (1997-2009). That looks like fun, I thought. And what a turnaround time!

Other Faces

2012-01-25T00:00:00+02:00

The city looms large in the headspace of its inhabitants, underpinning our sense of ourselves both as individuals and as part of a collective. The force and nature of the city is so compelling (the CIA’s World Factbook in 2010 estimated that 61% of South Africa’s population lives in cities; other sources estimate that this figure will rise to around 75% by 2030) that it induces an increasing number of artists to deal with its fabric, its terms and its effect on the psyches of those that live there.

In particular, Johannesburg seems to lay bare many of the conflicts at the heart of global diaspora and migration: economic competition, redefinition of space and territory, and a constant white noise of cultural friction. In his paper The Johannesburg Moment Professor Karl Von Holdt speaks of two major ways of thinking of Johannesburg. The first is as a contestation of ideas and power for influence, and control over spaces, institutions and sectors. The second way he views the city is as an intellectual and cultural project to reconfigure the lenses of Western ideology through which we make meaning of the city.

Tales of Mzanzi

2012-01-10T00:00:00+02:00

The American artist Frohawk Two Feathers stands in the middle of his exhibition, ‘The Edge of the Earth Isn’t Far From Here’, at Stevenson Gallery, unconsciously tugging at one of his dreadlocks. A woman, who has been acting as a self-appointed interlocutor at the walkabout, continues her seemingly endless enquiry into the painting A fashionable Xhosa and Khoi girls modelling the latest threads under the kissing the tree: 'But are you doing this for the American market? Because then they won’t understand it. I mean they are not going to know what a Xhosa or a Khoi is'.

Frohawk Two Feathers – he was born Umar Rashid in Chicago in 1976 – begins another attempt to satisfy the woman. He explains that the painting is a portrait of two girls he was once in love with at school. Their poses are modelled on a 1990s Chicago look, but they are part of his reimagining of the Cape Colony circa 1792, during the Frenglish Empire, a fictitious epoch that is a crucible of current and historical understandings and appropriations.

Further Fictions

2012-01-05T00:00:00+02:00

Commune.1 gallery, Cape Town’s new kid on the block, has had a solid run of engaging shows since it opened six months ago in a renovated double-volume building that once functioned as a morgue. This city-centre venue, which fits somewhere between the smaller project spaces and more established commercial galleries, has proven especially useful for graduate students whose degree exhibitions do not quite fit the parameters of existing gallery spaces.

Natasha Norman’s first solo show, 'Further Fictions', was exhibited in completion of her Masters degree at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, and was shown alongside Johannesburg artist Robyn Nesbitt’s smaller project 'Damn your eyes, damn your eyes'.

Thrown Together

2012-01-03T00:00:00+02:00

Like his exhibition at the Irma Stern Museum in 2006, Simon Stone’s current show, 'Thrown Together', comprises a variety of his characteristic pin-board compositions, a handful of his still lifes and several of his thick 500-paged notebooks crammed with watercolour sketches that serve both as reference for his painting and as limbering-up exercises. On average, Stone produces about 120 of these a month, and their exhilarating freedom and spontaneity make them an accomplishment in their own right.

The still lifes, like Nine Boxes, are highly accomplished works in which conventionally beautiful subject matter cedes to stark arrays of prosaic, utilitarian objects usually deemed devoid of aesthetic significance. Delicacy of colour, form and line transmute the nine empty cardboard boxes into a Whistlerian exercise in sumptuous restraint. Apart from a little cardboard brown and black, this tonal symphony revolves around luscious creamy whites that assume myriad different chromatic disguises as they reflect the colours of objects adjacent to them, flushing with tints of pink, gray and violet so pale and nuanced as to be almost imperceptible.

The squares and rectangles of the open and closed boxes are integrated into a sculptural essay in minimal geometry, and the carefully orchestrated contrasts between the solids and voids, the shapes and sizes, reveal a flair for placement, interval and rhythm worthy of Morandi. The boxes dictate a cubic theme, and the frame, drape, wall and table’s metal base either repeat the basic motif, or ring changes upon it, so that the entire painting becomes a fugue-like sequence of themes and variations.

The pin-board compositions are motley compilations of media images plundered from different cultures, continents and eras. Travel, art and architecture are the mainstreams of the artist’s inspiration, and some of his most arresting passages are painterly reveries, which evoke his favourite remembered places with a dreamy lyricism and wistful yearning. Nothing could be more evocative and atmospheric than the vignette of Table Bay in Fermi’s Lecture, the cameos of Victoria Falls and Knysna lagoon in Blue Summer, and the gray, wintry London skyline in Goodbye to Candescence.

Fucking Hell

2012-01-03T00:00:00+02:00

'Fucking Hell' marks the genesis of an extravagant, if not insanely laborious visual journey. The five new large-scale drawings featured on this exhibition are the first of Cameron Platter’s ten-year Apocalypse series, which will total 100 drawings on completion. Clearly Platter does not suffer from commitment issues. The drawings are adaptations and interpretations of lo-fi advertising signs and flyers collected by the artist. Like his animated video works, which feature recurring characters and symbols in bizarre and often sordid narratives, Platter’s drawings delight in the absurdity of the real and fuse seamlessly with his fatalistic critique of a very specific time and place. Gluttonous consumerism, mass over-indulgence in sex and meat, political looting and religious spin number amongst the illustrated utterances in his dense, claustrophobic pencil drawn compositions.

Wrecking at Private Siding 661

2011-12-30T00:00:00+02:00

The site of 'Wrecking at Private Siding 661' at Wapping is the point at which colonial history and Bridget Baker’s personal narrative intertwine. Now based in London, Baker was born in East London from a line of British settlers. These early narratives are transposed to the site at Wapping, East London, in the UK, where a large and peculiar object – a human transporter (a 19th century woven vessel) – has been recreated. The human transporter is installed in a distinct red brick hydraulic power station, which, due to its proximity to the Thames, powered a great part of London at the turn of the 19th century. Its heyday coincides with that of English settlement in South Africa, and the arrival of Baker’s ancestors in the Eastern Cape.

As you approach the space, your entry is shaped by a shattered bricked wall entrance, a construction which nods to the shattered wall framing the supine nude in Duchamp’s posthumously-built work Étant donnés (Given: 1 The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas) (1946-66). However in Baker’s work the viewer is invited to enter into the space, in contrast to the cool, distanced, voyeuristic gaze encouraged by Duchamp’s peephole. Although the human transporter sits quite comfortably in time within the accumulator tower, clues to its recent reconstruction are revealed in one anachronism: Looking up, one sees a shattered white Perspex ceiling, as if the transporter has crashed through. Descending from the top of the accumulator tower and through the ruptured ceiling, the woven object materialises a passage through time and space.

1989: At the Threshold of an Era

2011-11-27T00:00:00+02:00

'The Global Contemporary. Art Worlds after 1989' is a sprawling exhibition that opened at ZKM (Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe) this September. The exhibition forms part of Peter Weibel and Hans Belting's larger research project entitled 'Global Art and the Museum' (GAM) which started at ZKM in 2006, and which set out to create an archive of the state of the art world. In line with GAM's research aims, the ambitious project 'The Global Contemporary' - with its careful pluralisation of 'worlds' in the subtitle - looks at the importance of the year 1989 as a point from which we can begin to map the effects of globalization on art production and display, as well as institutions and markets.

1989 is the date around which many significant events and processes accrue: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the invention of the internet, and the eve of South Africa’s political and economic transformation. A timeline chronicling such major global events from the year 1989 is presented at the entrance of the show to set the socio-political scene. It should be noted, in addition, that 1989 has also become a salient point in exhibition history, with a recent series of books on ‘Making Art Global’ including volumes on the 1989 Havana Biennale, and the much-debated ‘Magiciens de la Terre’ at Centre Pompidou.

Threshold

2011-11-15T00:00:00+02:00

Virginia MacKenny's 'Threshold – Climate Change and Environmental Concern' is the first curated exhibition in this country to explore a range of concerns connected to climate change, ahead of the critical yet troubled COP 17 conference taking place in Durban at the end of this month. While many other countries have seen a focus on environmentally oriented research and artistic production, from recent blockbuster shows (such as Radical Nature at The Barbican which claimed to be ‘the first major exhibition to trace the post-war history of artists’ engagement with ecology and environmentalism’) to various longer-running projects, South Africa has been slow in its concentrated creative output in this area, although numerous artists' work has touched on it.

One of the reasons for this, I suspect, is that we are as a country still very much involved in post-colonial issues of race, gender and identity in the field of contemporary art production. Added to this is the fact that despite the currency and importance of environmental issues, there is still a degree of stigma attached. On the one hand, people are often put off by the dogma and didacticism of initiatives aimed at creating awareness. The discomfort of having yourself found wanting on ideological/ethical/emotional grounds is never appealing, and hard to shake.

On the other hand a purposefully earth-friendly sensibility still seems to be the preserve of the mostly wealthy, with insufficient connections made locally between environmental quality and economic inequality, social justice and environmental justice. In addition, ecological activism has always had a rightly radical basis in its challenge to gross corporate misconduct and business-as-usual politics, from overt Green Peace-style media gambits to more low-key interventions. Sometimes compelling and occasionally daft, these actions are understandably difficult for some people to take on, while many South Africans are simply not sufficiently aware. The result is that ecological projects so often fail to find the right balance and garner the level of support befitting the time, passion and intelligent contributions that they involve.

The Fine Black Line

2011-11-07T00:00:00+02:00

This exhibition of recent works on paper and sculpture by Beth Armstrong offered a multifaceted intellectual examination of human psychology through line and space. To skip the last step is a series of delicate and complex drypoint engravings on Fabriano, and was exhibited in conjunction with prints from Armstrong’s more recent series, towards an architecture of loss. A small range of steel-wire and jacaranda sculptures, reminiscent of her ‘Hippocampus’ (2010) exhibition at the same venue was also included in the exhibition.

The 27 prints in to skip the last step relate to the recent death of artist Mark Hipper. Although Armstrong does not discuss the exact nature of her relationship to Hipper, this series takes the viewer on an extremely personal journey through Hipper’s empty house, guided by grief-stricken Armstrong. The small prints, narrated by a single line of text beneath, float in the centre of a large white page. Armstrong’s prints are reminiscent of David Hockney’s Illustrations for Fourteen Poems from C. P. Cavafy (1966), whose domestic, homoerotic scenes of nostalgia are depicted in an almost identical style.

The scenes are vacant, denying the viewer visual cues and disallowing a simple reading of the image. Rooms containing empty chairs, locked wardrobes, closed doors and empty picture frames are all conjured by a fine black line that tremulously traces the outline of each article, as if from a photograph. Her use of line is fragile in its slightly-wavering straightness. The strong, horizontal and vertical lines of skirting boards and walls are drawn in an unsteady, free-hand style; this self-reflexivity draws attention to the intensely personal nature of these images. Armstrong leads us into her private domain. Everything we see is being shown to us directly through her hand; one must also consider that which she refuses to show.

To skip the last step utilises the comic strip format through its frame-by-frame narrative, accompanied by dead-pan text. Unlike the biting political satire of Bitterkomix, for instance, this comic has a narrative of grief and a self-reflexive mockery of mourning. The emotion in the text ranges from statements of desperate loneliness, to a paranoid belief in the lingering presence of the deceased. These comic-style images yearn for a main character, a human figure to inhabit these empty spaces. We are denied this comfort as Armstrong herself reckons with the yawning, empty rooms of the house that used to contain her loved one. A study of emptiness and confinement, the series negotiates the gaping white spaces between the delicate black lines.

In The Artists’ Absence

2012-02-08T02:24:00+02:00

The COLLECTIVE presents seven young, contemporary Belgian artists on invitation by artist Riaan van Jaarsveldt (ZA). The show was conceived as an opportunity to introduce the Durban public and local artists to the Belgian art scene.

The participating artists are:

Wouter Van der Hallen, Tomas Boiy, Ben Van den Berghe, Oscar Hugal, Kristof van Gestel, Joris Van de Moortel, Timothy Segers

The premise of the show is strictly shaped around the logistical and budgetary constraints of such an exercise as a means to bridge these obvious obstacles and thereby transforming them into content/material. Therefore the artists were each requested to submit instructions to make an artwork for a show entitled In The Artists’ Absence, each of which will be interpreted and performed/created by van Jaarsveldt (of course within budgetary constraints). The artists have been given complete carte blanche as to how they may issue their instructions. Alongside his or her instruction pieces, each artist will have the opportunity to make a limited edition print assisted and facilitated by Tomas Boiy at his Antwerp, Belgium studio.

'State of the Art Photography'

2012-02-06T00:00:00+02:00

Photography is currently going through a period of change. It is not just the digital revolution that is changing the way photos are taken and the technology that is used, thus broadening possibilities: the global data space itself has become a new resource. Despite all the digitalisation, the method of producing a unique analogue photograph remains an option. Aesthetics and the way photos are ‘staged’ are changing. Migration and globalisation are new themes. The ‘new photographers’ have a different perspective on the history of photography. They have new heroes; heroes that come from history and from other disciplines. They are no longer afraid of the aural and the sublime. And they are open to new forms of presentation, to installations, to a blend of media and materials. Photography, so it would seem, has at last arrived in the free arts.

‘The future does not belong to pure photography, but to the free arts,’ says Andreas Gursky, one of the advisors of the 'State of the Art Photography' exhibition. The NRW-Forum Dusseldorf asked for photographers who are tipped to be the movers and the shakers in this field in the coming years. In an attempt to reflect this remit, each of the 40 artists/photographers who feature in this summary exhibition is represented by a collection of images or an installation.

'Prism. Drawings from 1990 to 2012'

2012-02-06T13:40:00+02:00

Rather than exhibiting drawings in a classical sense, the exhibition 'Prism', curated by Gavin Jantjes, presents drawings as understood and defined by a select group of important contemporary artists. The discipline has expanded and evolved over the past two decades and currently includes several creative forms of expression that were previously not defined as drawing.

The exhibition’s name, 'Prism', evokes a tool that enables a variety of approaches, akin to how a glass prism disperses light into a multicoloured spectrum. In order for drawing and its new forms and variants to survive as an autonomous art form, it is essential that we take a closer look at the ongoing experimentation.

The exhibition features everything from digital drawings to drawing as performance, from sculptural paperwork to pictures made with needlework on fabric. We are also presented with works that reveal a more conceptual approach to the medium: What is a drawing? And what is a copy of a drawing? Or what is reality, and what is a representation of reality? The artists thereby problematise and experiment with different levels and aspects of the age-old discipline.

'This Must Be The Place'

2012-02-06T13:23:00+02:00

The South African photographer Pieter Hugo’s monumental photographs, centred around contemporary Africa, are now well known around the world, catalysed by recent awards including the KLM Paul Huf award in 2008 and a nomination for the 2012 the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. The Hague Museum of Photography will be the first museum to exhibit a comprehensive survey of Hugo’s work from 2003-2011. Together with many previously unseen works, the exhibition will include a curated selection of his most well-known series: The Hyena & Other Men, the bizarre Nollywood and the striking Permanent Error. His impressive portraits tell personal stories about recurring themes throughout his oeuvre, namely those people who inhabit the margins of society in sub-Saharan Africa.

'Revolution vs Revolution'

2012-02-06T13:09:00+02:00

Since 2010, countries from the Arab world have been going through a period of rapid and radical change. Events from the Atlantic to the Arabian Gulf promise new previously unforeseeable trajectories. A new narrative is unfolding.??

It is in this context and in the light of these historical events that Beirut Art Center presents an exhibition and series of events exploring other junctures from the last fifty years that have led to radical changes, such as revolutions, the rise and fall of regimes and ideologies, as well as social and political movements whose effects were felt around the world and to this day. This includes important movements like the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and fall of Communism in Europe, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the end of Apartheid, the student riots in the 60s, as well as Nasserism and the rise of Arab Nationalism.

'Fine Lines'

2012-02-01T00:00:00+02:00

The KZNSA presents a new body of work from KZN-based artist Louise Hall. Through a series of figurative images reflecting change, transition and impermanence, the exhibition attempts to explore the medium of drawing and its relationship to painting.

'Parasomnia'

2012-01-26T10:15:00+02:00

Parasomnia brings together photographs from Sassen's recent Parasomnia series and some from her previous series, Flamboya.

Sassen spent her childhood years in East Africa. She describes that, on her family's return to the Netherlands, she felt like a foreigner in her homeland but knew that she had also been an outsider in Africa. Parasomnia animates these feelings of dislocation between home and away, night and day, life and dreams. The series comprises photographs taken in West and East Africa over the past two years, as well as a few taken in Europe, which frame her enigmatic and often haunting narratives.

As a New York Times critic recently noted (in a review of the Museum of Modern Art's New Photography exhibition), Sassen's images 'convey how strangely vivid and tantalizingly sad the world can seem to a mind and eye divested of the usual filters of perception'. Her photographs constantly disrupt our usual perceptions because some are carefully constructed while others are incidental scenes she encounters on her travels, leaving us unsure which are her imaginary fictions and which scenes from life. Her distinct visual language is articulated by a deep awareness of the formalist concerns of painting, sculpture and photography, as well as an acute sense of colour and the optical resonances of pattern and design.

'The Unspoken'

2012-01-26T09:57:00+02:00

The exhibition comprises sculptures and drawings made with cowhide and cow hair, and paintings in oil on canvas. Unlike the distinctive figurative forms that the artist has previously made familiar to us, the drawings and paintings are abstract and ambiguous. They could also be perceived as parts or fragments of bodies such as bums, elbows, bellybuttons or toes, or the ears, nose, mouth, anus and vagina through which we draw in and expel life forces.
Mntambo describes the impulse behind The Unspoken:

The work I am making gives form to the loud silences in our lives that seem to be hidden but are actually in plain sight, if we choose to see them - or the conversations that one only ever has with oneself, even though others are having similar conversations, also with themselves. In terms of forms, I think of folds, holes, bumps, crevices and spaces that are indeterminate in some respect. They engage our attention and draw us into a space, but an element always remains hidden from view, never fully revealing itself. In this way we are reminded of the sentences that are edited out of our exchanges even though others may well be aware of our unspoken thoughts and feelings.

'Periphery'

2012-01-26T09:47:00+02:00

Periphery finds Cullberg navigating the border between the tangible and intangible and is the first time that his abstracts have come to the fore alongside his signature cover portraits. Despite the seemingly separate elements it is undoubtedly a homogenous body of work; the combination of abstract paint-scapes and representational cover portraits never feels disparate. The two dissimilar styles work in unison towards fleshing out Cullberg’s painterly objectives.

Throughout the exhibition, Cullberg’s unifying thread is the creation of a space comprised of subjective and personal free-association. This applies both to the artist himself during the creation process and to the viewer, who is observing the paintings. With little or no sense of a planned outcome or destination, the artist intuitively peruses the annals of his record and book collections and viscerally responds to his medium.

Subsequently, the logic behind Cullberg’s diverse arrangements of covers from his collections of pop, jazz and classical records, art theory texts, novels, children’s books and exhibition catalogues, is often opaque. An open field of interpretation is key. The abstracts take this to a more visceral realm. In a similar vein to Kandinsky’s Composition works (sans grandiose modernist pretentions), Cullberg’s paintings exhibit a strong musical sensibility as brushwork, gestural lines and colour move into unconstrained intuitive territory.

As a foil to the associative nature of the cover portraits, the abstracts mark a space of reflection. Exhibited alongside one another, the viewer is perpetually tugged between objective recognition and cognitive free-association, a space define as periphery.

'UNACCAPTABLE'

2012-01-26T09:28:00+02:00

The exhibition UNACCEPTABLE combines various elements drawn from researched material and memory. The term is a label for that which is outside of the norms in society.

Drawing from a collection of various ‘love’ territories previously inhabited by the artist, a fragile and personal point of view emerges from a space that has previously been framed as ‘political’.

Because Love is Not Enough [Sound Installation, 2012] is a fictional piece set in Kenya in 1950, during the Mau-Mau war. It is a follow-up of Not Yet, and Nobody Knows Why Not [2008], a performance piece that took place during a protest gathering of Mau-Mau war veterans against the current Kenyan leadership, where Kukama stood at the entrance of the venue where people gathered and, seductively as well as violently, applied red lipstick to her entire face.

The sound installation Because Love is not Enough narrows down to a single moment in the beginning of a fictitious love affair that is already on the verge of its end. Oblivious to its surrounding political realities, this single moment magnifies to a point reflecting that which is outside of itself.

At the opening of the exhibition there will be a performance rendition of the eleventh season of Little Britain, a popular TV comedy series. In this season, the idea of love shifts between the "innocent" and the "vulgar", inserting at times the most unpredictable expressions of the term.

An accompanying video piece goes further to build unlikely relationships between throw-away ideas, unfinished thoughts or phrases, and borrowed terms to render them all as equally valuable elements within making a term as immaterial as "love" graspeable.