Athi-Patra Ruga opens Dada to gender issues. His images are serious, touching on the classification of a person considered to be ‘coloured’; yet they also appear as a joke, absurd. The three naked bodies face us almost like a provocation ('I exist: deal with me!') but the masks worn on the faces, very clear and clean, turn the figures into puppets, reminiscent of Hugo Ball’s costumes. They are kind of nowhere, a strange impression mixing strong presence and quasi absence.
Donna Kukama is on a swing, and the people under the swing are trying to catch her. Another angle on daily life? Strangeness and poetry reside in it, with very minimal actions and just a particular angle of vision. I could also speak about Tracey Rose’s love me, fuck me, an enigmatic and fascinating image of a kind of fake white freak boxing himself which stays in my head as a strong picture; about Ed Young’s Yoko Ono – Yono Omo, two small washing powder packages whose names are Yono and Omo, their juxtaposition suggesting a link with an artistic figure from the north, associated with the post Dada movement, a pop star. Or Nicholas Hlobo’s jacket, its back between a backpack and a hump.
I don’t know if Dada was a time bomb (it was just a group of artists in a cabaret …), and despite the hyperbole that surrounds it, it definitely didn’t change the world. Yet certainly it was an instant of energy, an underground way to question the status quo through secret and paradoxical languages which are in turn self-questioning, and play with the complexity of the world. I see something about that in these artists’ propositions. Critically, their works open up spaces for dialogue around key issues.
In this exhibition there is a certain quality of the porous, reflecting the South African context. Works on the show refer constantly to the outside. I have the impression this exhibition is kind of ‘boiling’: it is full of energy. Jane Alexander’s collages inform me about a certain time, the 80s in South Africa, as John Heartfied’s pieces did, and still do about another time. Same with Steven Cohen’s couches, with textiles printed with explicit images of white bodies, referring to nazism and colonial history. It’s direct, it’s strong, and it punches. And it makes me remember a visit to the last Basel Art Fair, to the young galleries exhibition space. I was with a Cameroonian friend, and we came to the same conclusion. There were a lot of galleries, really, yet one constantly received the impression that even though the works were well done, professional, they had very little relation to the outside world. Artists were speaking about themselves, and that was all. Blind! I couldn’t find a keypoint, an entrance door to something I would project myself into, that would link me with the world I’m living in.
Dada, as Hans Arp said, became the object of a general reprobation. Here this is not the case, the context is different and that is good news. Dada began in a cabaret, and challenged museum conventions and the official approach to art in many ways. Here, the curatorial text asks, ‘What will we continue to make of this opportunity, nearby a century later?’ Of course, Kendell Geers is destroying a display case with a brick and this piece, as with much of his work, is meaningful at a time when the hegemony of the occidental format of exhibition is really becoming a serious question to be asked, in a context where the art market is expanding exponentially.
Also, I don’t know if the fact that the pieces on the exhibition are packed closely together is a curatorial choice or a lack of space, but it creates a kind of proximity in the way you experience it. Objects seem to be linked together, which I can understand (as a scenographer I’m constantly curious about non-conventional modes of exhibition). And there is this piece, by Nathaniel Stern, Stuttering, which is fascinating: an infra-red camera creates direct interaction between the body of the audience and the appearance of sentences on the wall. Curiosity makes you move actively in the space in order to make the sentences appear. The proximity with famous abstract films by Duchamp and Leger suggests a parallel: they also activate the audience’s brain.
There is a question about the exhibition which arises: is a museum the most appropriate space to show these artistic practices? It’s the relationship to audiences I’m questioning. At a time when the museum or gallery is being seen as only one space to exhibit, are there not other possibilities in closer interaction with urban space, closer to life? It seems to me this is a Dada question.
This is not to say that this relationship to other spaces and ways of showing are absent from the exhibition. Many pieces refer to performances and events in non-museum spaces. Robin Rhode’s piece, 25 images documenting a chess party (but painted as graffiti on the wall, except the fact the two players are ‘real’ and very well dressed up) is very curious: you think about an event but you are not sure it really happened.
Really, Dada is an energy and the interest of this exhibition is to see that one of the major movements in European modern art can be, almost 100 years later, connected with the contemporary non-occidental and postcolonial world (this cannot be said about many of the artists' practices and movements coming from the old continent). Dada is alive in contexts where there are tensions, where the complexity of the world is there, visible. And I’m not sure this is the case with much of the art practice in Europe at the moment, even though events there are kind of challenging us, as artists and citizens, to react.
A lot happens which requires a way of contesting, of deconstructing, in order to position art in relation to life. There is an intuition which arises when I see this exhibition: we will probably have to take something from these energies coming from non-European contexts, in order to question our own artists' practices. But as a curatorial text truly says, ‘ …that operation is always a bit suspicious …’
Is Europe really ready for that?
Jean Christophe Lanquetin is a scenographer and an artist based in France. He teaches at the Strasbourg Decorative School of Art. As a key member of Urban Scenography, he has run artists projects in Douala, Kinshasa, Alexandria and Johannesburg.
