Whilst it may seem that his objects now appear to take second place to the filmic medium, they nevertheless play an intrinsic role in the critical commentary of the narrative MacGarry weaves through his exhibitions. However, this syncretic relationship is not always entirely legible, with the results being often inconsistent across exhibitions.
‘End Game’, produced for the Standard Bank award and currently touring the country, premiered his second film, Will to Power, and featured only two sculptural works amongst other two-dimensional projections. In what was an experimental play between film and objects, the show can be described as an indulgent foray into an abstractly dense landscape that resisted interpretation by almost deliberately alienating the viewer.
However, in his latest exhibition, 'ENTERTAINMENT', currently on show at the Stevenson in Jo’burg, the balance between theory and practice, MacGarry’s operational maxim, seems to have found a happy medium. Unlike in ‘End Game’, his newest film Race of Man does not compete with, and thus overpower, his sculptural works, but rather dialogically situates them in an interplay between visual text and physical object.
Upon entering the gallery, the foyer is bare apart from a gory still culled from the film, which displays Player 1 (acted by Jaco van der Westhysen, who also edited and co-produced Race of Man) sitting against a whited-out background covered in blood, a 9mm pistol in his hand.
Walking around the corner into the labyrinthine maze that demarcates the space of the Stevenson, one is then confronted by a bronze sculpture of the head of a ram thinly veiled in a white patina. Titled Onan the Magnificent, the work is an intertextual reference to the omniscient narrator of the film Onan, which begins to orientate the broader narrative of the show. To have the head cast, MacGarry bought a live animal, which he had slaughtered, saying that this process was part of the work itself. When viewed in the guise of the film itself, this violent process stirs to uncanny life the sentiment echoed in the Race of Man where, in victory, one has to consume their opponent.
Executed in the sci-fi genre similar to Will to Power, Race of Man opens with a stirring score familiar to the early genre pieces from the '80s. As the opening credits role, the montage drifts through hallucinatory scapes of gaseous, cosmic matter like one sees in the pages of a National Geographic feature of the Hubble Telescope. Like Space Odyssey: 2001, the films opening scene cuts to a barren desert scape, yet in this version the feuding gorillas are replaced by humans. The omnipresent voice of the narrator is that of Onan.
Those familiar with the biblical myth of Onan will recall that he, upon the death of his brother, was called upon by Yahweh to perform what is controversially known in Zulu culture as ukugena, where the surviving brother is required to perform familial duty and impregnate his widowed brother’s wife. Yet in the biblical version, used as a form of moralising exegesis against the sin of masturbation, Onan failed to perform this task and withdrew, ‘spoiling his seed’.
Exegesis, much like hermeneutics, concerns itself with the critical interpretation of texts, most often those of a biblical origin. MacGarry’s attempt, when viewed against his sculptural work, creates a dialogue that addresses the conditions alluded to in the title The Race of Man. In the film, players compete against each other across a series of levels, where the objective is to kill one's opponent in order to proceed to the next level.
As the film snaps to the desert, the audience is introduced to Player 1, who sits with his legs outstretched in the sand, manically drumming a golf club on his feet, humming to himself. This is the weapon he’s been given to vanquish his enemy in order to make it to the next level, yet Onan tells him he’s got the choice of weapon change. Yet his enemy in this case is not his enemy, it is merely another man stuck in this fatal and cruel game. After a failed battle between Player 1 armed with a golf club and Player 3, whose gun ‘does not work on humans’, the pair join forces and change weapon to eliminate a third character played by Jan Henri Booyens.
Typically in MacGarry’s films, the weapons feature in the exhibition as props or addenda that further accentuate the narrative. Interestingly the space age-looking gun of Player 3 is a licenced prop from District 9, with MacGarry’s signature cleat nails acting to fetishise the object. Whilst these object attest to the violence inherent in the subtext of the exhibition, when similarly read together with the other objects on the exhibition, they provide a framing device that allows the film some contextual breathing room. Infinite Progress, a cement mixer also clad in cleat nails, speaks of the counterintuitive logic of capitalism through its oxymoronic title. The object, now redundant, nevertheless echoes the ability for advancement that is stalled by the manipulations of a global economy bent on self betterment rather than free progress.
When read in conjunction with the two futuristic paintings (significantly imported from China), titled Chinese iron ore frigates off the coast of Dar es Salaam, 2048 and Abuja, Nigeria, 2034 on either end of the room, the works speak of an antiquated idea of the future that is at once utopic as it is dystopic. As MacGarry dryly quips, ‘the future ain’t no art history’. This dystopic element is perhaps best summated in the end of the film which closes at the ‘terminal level’ where Player 1, having defeated his previous ally in a whited-out space is cursed to repeat the process in a promethean loop that takes him back to the beginning.
As his bloodied gaze addresses the viewer, the camera slowly pulls back, revealing an enormous studio space at the edge of the white plane. This disjuncture with the hermetic filmic space suggests a frame outside the demarcations MacGarry defines. As the narrative breaks and the lights of the studio are revealed, the structure is shattered and the viewer’s notion of the white cube becomes destablised. Tying this altogether is another bronze standing phallically amongst the other sculptures of the show. Historical Materialism, when viewed together with the other objects, perhaps best explains the detritus of progress that MacGarry addresses. Topped by a skull with an extended nose that gives the work a disquietening presence, on closer inspection the work is seen to consist of quotidian objects that seem to be taken from childhood: a doll’s arm, an X-box controller, the stock of a BB gun, an old camera, a Coke bottle.
Perhaps a clue to understanding all the disparate elements of the exhibition lies in this field of junk. As the title suggests, a turn of Marx seems inevitable; ‘Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production’.
Art critic Matthew Partridge is based in Johannesburg.
