New Adventures

Its most engaging quality is the perfect symmetry and the straightforward brevity with which the artist engages in complexities of globalisation, colonisation and trade.  The problem with this work, though, is that while it is described in the ‘New Adventures’ catalogue, many viewers missed Free Trade Rider entirely – exhibited as it was amongst 45 minutes of video works and represented amongst a plethora of often seemingly unrelated works in a frenetic exhibition catalogue.

This feeling of a fissure between a work and its realisation, as well as the sense that good work, and good ideas, are lost amongst an excess of production, is one that pervades the entire exhibition which sits uncomfortably between retrospective and solo show.

In Playing Guitar for Goats Coetzer again uses simplicity or, here, literalness as a successful mechanism for representing complex issues of artistic voice, place and Pan-Africanism. With the title taken from a Swahili saying, the piece speaks simultaneously of a white man’s drive to conquer, to convert, to convince and of the futility embedded in this impulse, but also in the artistic impulse generally – speaking a language that no one understands, playing a tune to deaf ears and so on. As the artist explains in his catalogue: 'Whilst literally acting out the proverb, I felt a bit sheepish and realised that missionary zeal can border on stupidity'.

Along a similar theme is another very likable piece, Temporary Rebellion in which Brian Schwarz, a balding, and ageing rocker in a shiny shirt plays his drum kit furiously in a space on the N1 linking Pretoria and Johannesburg. Almost definitely inaudible amongst the roar of Joburg traffic, the piece becomes a tragic, though also humorous, account of the artist’s voice, lost amongst the everyday din, like playing drums for goats, or, for people in cars with the windows rolled up.

The pieces above are very successful and see a new stage of Coetzer’s career in which the artist really interrogates his own position as a now over-40, fragile, white Afrikaner in Africa. These pieces, however, as well as other gems, like Smart Casual Bulletproof and Weekend Cathedral are overwhelmed by works, which seem less resolved, and not as well considered, such as Maasai and Afrikaner, which simply shows the artist next to Gabriel Lengees, a Maasai man in Kenya – both artists mid-air, jumping (though the catalogue text for this piece is entertaining) and Papa was a Rolling Stone in which Coetzer attempts to embody his mid-life crisis by repeatedly rolling down a hill (this sounds more engaging than it is).

The two works that dominate the main space at blank projects also undermine the weight of some of the video documentation, which all runs on one loop. Culture Medium is a collection of multi-coloured microphones attached to a podium, with seats set in front of it in anticipation of both an audience and speaker. 

In his catalogue text, the artist claims reference to the form of the bouquet and Dutch still lives. However, these links seem tenuous on observing the work, which seems a too-easy representation of the unheard act of speaking itself, a common theme in the show. Using the obvious motif of microphones, and the empty podium, as well as a rather vague title and unimpressive visual connotations, the work has little or no affect.

Similarly, Epoch Counter consists of a series of giant plywood modules, which mimic the lines of digital clocks, each printed with different ways of denoting the epoch, as opposed to the popular, Christian ‘AD’. This piece lacks the punch and the subtlety which makes much of Coetzer’s work exciting.deliv
 
Jacques Coetzer has clearly produced some significant work in the last four years. As a body of work, however, 'New Adventures' doesn’t quite live up to the promise of the artist’s best work, with unresolved presentation and weaker works distracting from the intelligent, playful and ingenious production of the artist at his best. Though better, perhaps, as a book than an exhibition, Coetzer’s 'New Adventures' is still an important contribution to the contemporary South African arts canon.