cape reviews

I suppose taking up a desk in a museum to make 100 or more tightly woven lines that approximate a pipe could accommodate a sort of mindful absence. Arguably, to feel a sense of professionalism, to actually do and realise productivity and ideas, one needs a space. That’s step one. Ascertaining an alliance, hopefully based more on thematic affinity and kinship than an old boys' network, is step two. Traditionally such collectives gestate in the classroom; they grow out of shared gripes, criticism and scepticism of art’s role in society, how it is made, presented and received. Today, blogs and sites that rely on multiple users for content form relevant equivalents to this form of collaboration. 

Enter Io Makandal, Sam McCulloch, Grace Cross, Jessie Hammond, Jared Ginsburg and Rodan Kane Hart, all former Michaelis graduates and the core members of The Open Drawer Projects. This budding collective condensed an approximately five-week in situ improvisation based on collective studio practice into a one-night closing event. Had you visited either the project or closing event at VANSA’s Spin Street Gallery, you would have had the privilege to see what 39 days of mindful absence has to present.

The logbook at the top of the staircase to the gallery space functioned as testimony to attendance, and 'creating a serious vibe' (11H35, 05/09/11, Will). Titled 'Part 1: The Drawing Room', the exhibition gave the impression of having cleaned up the drawing room for guests, much in the way a friend’s lounge appears with its carefully curated stack of books that leave you wondering about life’s contents lying not quite out of sight. That’s the hook. The real interest provoked by this initiative had less to do with the drawn and printed things, things projected and installed. It was the enterprise of utilising a space, arguably an ‘off-space’ to the local circuit, collectively, and igniting intrigue as to what went on in the preceding five weeks of making and taking up a working-hours residency. 

Drawing, the stepchild medium, routinely en route to greater paintings and sturdier sculptures, is often associated with adjectives like 'peripheral' and 'subsidiary'. But it is a verb too. Richard Serra said so in 1977. Makandal, who together with McCulloch put forth the ODP, mentions Serra’s influence in the explanation of the group’s nascent ethos of mobility and installing ideas 'that stem from, but [are] not limited to drawing in all its manifestations'. It is clear that Makandal is cross-hatching and wandering about a page. Her delicate, multiple works on paper, rendered in black on white in varying sizes, cohere into a single meditation on the activity of drawing. 

In Exhausting an Extension #1-5, a series of five works, evenly spaced, vertical lines in various colours make their way, without pause, to a stop a few centimetres above the edge of the page. Such extensions, simple and unfussy, mimic tests in concentration, the longevity of your drawing materials, and the steadiness of the hand. Daniel Zeller comes to mind. According to Zeller every sign or drawn mark is 'sovereign territory', which you cannot go over or alter – a drawing isn’t always just flat.

An installation by Makandal and Cross, crudely formed with rods and cable ties, greeted you when you entered the room. The shadow cast by this awkward drawing mechanism makes for an elegant piece: structural yet impermanent, it may literally labour the point, but metaphorically does not. 

Drawings can manifest as an activity; this is one version attached to the medium. There is also the attraction of its faux naiveté, which is the stuff of a new folk sensibility. Darger and Wolfli trumped the outsider aesthetic of distorted realities by exercising obsessive pathology. Dzama illustrates absurd if not dark-humoured characters – seemingly harmless armies of girls and boys in the woods. Shrigley gets away with crudely formed one-liners that simplify grief and conflict, the art circles and awkward conversation. Nordstrum does Socratic irony better in print. Ginsburg pulls it off with his reduced monotypes. 

Numbered and set in a wood slide case, the small photocopies offer intimate visual encounters; they possess the scale of poems. Viewable at a lamp-lit desk, Ginsburg’s recordings respond to drawing as an analogue and slowed down process, and offer up moments of deadpan humour and solitary pleasure (slide 108: 'Masterbating', sic). 

Both Ginsburg and Cross employ a considered artlessness, so to speak, with crudely rendered subject matter reprieved from personal surrounds and the centre city. Cross picks up on the detritus and signposts of the neighbourhood with her intuitive sketches, quick visual notes made with paint and crayon on paper plates and other odd bits. A somewhat hit-and-run approach, Cross’s intentionally disjointed aesthetic offers her a means of effecting what she describes as the 'hybrid nature of post-colonial South African environments'. So, King Kong is presented alongside familiar roadside vernacular; it is a redux of the classic surrealist game, Exquisite Corpse. In another work she records the absurdity of a shop storefront, seen on the route from Parliament to VANSA: A. White Chemist takes its name from Mr. A. White’s Pharmacy on Plein Street. 

McCulloch’s video piece, Untitled Stills (work in progress), was essentially a piece of correspondence. Now resident in Melbourne, McCulloch set-up a drawing station so as to continue her participation remotely. The looped footage of unrecognizable surface textures, desktop screenshots and drawn nomads served as a continuously moving drawing. The lapsed transitions revealed an inherent gap in the act of drawing. What you see is not what you get: you look away from what you observe so as to put mark to paper, and in so doing the hand obscures what it aspires to secure. 

Hammond’s station of slowly mutating wax and ink caught between two pieces of glass trumped this thought. By dismantling found slide projectors, exposing their components, and refiguring their aesthetic, so that they function without hiding the mechanics, Hammond’s practice lies in the patience of looking, of waiting for the heat of the bulb to mutate the wax. For the impatient, a sped-up video version described one such mutation. Hammond uses carbon deposits (smoke) as a medium that can be drawn into and transferred to paper by means of an etching press, an example of which stood in the centre of the space. There is no fixed mark to Hammond’s exercise including those of the printed matter she had on display. 

Contrary to this, Hart’s corner in the gallery space presented solid matter. His contribution was a steel and glass table with chair set below a fluorescent tube. Set next to it was a plinth with concrete top and plywood chest of drawers. The installation mimicked a rather smart studio practice. Think Performative/Narrative by Victor Burgin. His installation included a framed work of photographs, Sol LeWitt-like studies on patterning found in the city: roof tiles, paving, brickwork and louvered forms. Hart’s work suggested a draughtsman worrying his way through an aspect of a set of plans yet to be realised. The half-opened, middle drawer of the plywood chest offered a discrete divergence from the otherwise perfect desk, which included a lithograph of a sketchbook. The black lines were, of course, cross-hatched.

Sara-Aimee Verity is a printmaker based in Cape Town.