Cape gallery, YOUNGBLACKMAN, nearly found themselves homeless last week, when their landlord interrupted artist Stuart Bird jackhammering the cement floor of the Roeland Street gallery.  

The act formed part of a performance for an exhibition entitled 'Vex and Siolence', a collaboration between Bird, and fellow artists, Linda Stupart and Belinda Blignaut. In a performance which lasted over two hours, Bird jackhammered the gallery’s floor, while Stupart’s piping, installed above the glass front of the gallery, sent a constant...

Cape gallery, YOUNGBLACKMAN, nearly found themselves homeless last week, when their landlord interrupted artist Stuart Bird jackhammering the cement floor of the Roeland Street gallery.  

The act formed part of a performance for an exhibition entitled 'Vex and Siolence', a collaboration between Bird, and fellow artists, Linda Stupart and Belinda Blignaut. In a performance which lasted over two hours, Bird jackhammered the gallery’s floor, while Stupart’s piping, installed above the glass front of the gallery, sent a constant stream of rain or tears flowing down the glass; ‘like in sad movies’, explained Stupart. Blignaut meanwhile, poured congealed lumps of melted Chappies over the welts Bird had produced. 

On discovering Bird in the midst of his performance, gallerist Matthew Blackman said the landlord was extremely angry and wanted to evict them immediately.  

‘He said it wasn’t art, it was vandalism’, said Blackman, adding that the man was only pacified over an hour and a half later, after a builder hired by the gallery explained that he was to re-lay the floor, which had been cracked, anyway.

This is not the first time that the gallery’s controversial exhibitions have fallen foul of conventional lease agreements.  They narrowly missed eviction in June, when Kendall Geers recreated his 1993 work, 'Title Withheld (Brick)', in which the artist tossed bricks through the window of the gallery. Blackman said that the landlord was also not particularly happy with artist Linda Stupart’s 'Who’s Abject Now Bitch', an exhibition held in December of last year, which involved stage blood being sprayed over the interior of the gallery.  

'To be honest, he does have a point,' Blackman conceded. 'Any landlord wouldn’t want people jack-hammering the floor, breaking the windows and throwing blood all over the place'.

Visitors can view the residue of the performance from the street, and after dark there is a projection of the performance, and the rain is turned on.