In the Arsenale, South Africa’s Moshekwa Langa has installed Temporal Distance (With Criminal Intent). You Will Find Us in the Best Places (1997-2009), a piece that has been displayed in and developed through various settings, since the second Johannesburg Biennale in 1997. To the familiar toy cars, puzzle pieces and spools of yarn which construct a striated landscape across the floor, he has added the local touch of empty bottles of Cynard, Select and Aperol – the colourful aperitifs used to make the region’s most characteristic drink, lo spritz. The yarn connects urban ciphers of transport and industry, expatriation and memory, but always with elusive, personal poetics that seem to magnetically draw the viewer. I watched for several minutes as people stared at the piece, transfixed, trying to follow the lines which eventually led to their own feet.
Perhaps the best way to engage with the 'unmappable' nature of the Biennale is through the notion of 'altermodernity', Nicolas Bourriaud’s new catchphrase from this year’s Tate Triennial (which seems poised to frame ongoing articulations of contemporary art). A major figure in the early theorizing of postmodernism, Bourriaud is perhaps uniquely qualified to posit its impending death. He argues that:
our globalised perception calls for new types of representation: our daily lives are played out against a more enormous backdrop than ever before, and depend now on trans-national entities, short or long-distance journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe… This evolution can be seen in the way works are made: a new type of form is appearing, the journey-form, made of lines drawn both in space and time, materialising trajectories rather than destinations. The form of the work expresses a course, a wandering, rather than a fixed space-time… Altermodern art is thus read as a hypertext; artists translate and transcode information from one format to another, and wander in geography as well as in history.
Certainly this hypothesis rings true for much of the art on show this year: a focus on material trajectories composed and performed through the symphony of the everyday, traveling through – and creating anew – histories, geographies, selves, worlds.
While initially disappointed at the lack of a South African pavilion – loudly proclaimed in the first two official 53rd Biennale press releases, then conspicuously absent in the third – or the sense of a strong African presence at large (particularly after the last Venice Biennale’s significant, if contested, African pavilion), I found this more subtle approach surprisingly productive. Swooping into this perceived gap like a cultural superhero (or a rather astute bird of prey?) however, was Stellenbosch’s SMAC gallery (on usefully good terms with influential curator Vincenzo Sanfo). Its unofficial pavilion, entitled 'I Linguaggi del Mondo' (Languages of the World), features Kay Hassan, Johann Louw and Wayne Barker, each of whom merges a localized vocabulary of ideas and issues within a wider visual syntax.
More of a political statement then a particularly edgy independent exhibition, SMAC laments South Africa’s absence from the international art arena due to a lack of official and government support. The show’s press release points out that 'it is anomalous that a country which is part of the G20, hosting the 2010 Soccer World Cup and stands as the undisputed economic powerhouse on the continent, ignores the plight of its artists for representation and rejects the international art community.' Fair enough: once again, it seems that private galleries and corporate sponsors have had to intervene, acting as surrogates for government’s role as cultural custodian. More effective than SMAC’s intervention, though, is Wayne Barker’s simple, subversive insertion of an artwork – or at least a cipher of its absence through the standardized form of the explanatory wall text – into Birnbaum’s curated exhibition. The small, but powerful intervention continues to go undetected (as well as uncorrected in its two glaring typos) by the majority of viewers, perhaps, one may argue, like much contemporary South African art in the international arena:
Wayne Barker
Erratum (whose worlds?) 2003
(Insertion 2009)
Exhibiting unofficialy on the Making Worlds exhibtion is Barker’s attempt to break the
pervading silence that surrounds local art expressions within the international domain and to draw attention to South African contemporary art and the representivity thereof.
In response to Daniel Birnbaum's exhibition title, Making Worlds, artists like Barker living on the so-called periphery can ask the question; Whose Worlds? [sic]
Whose worlds indeed.
