The opening sentence: 'The human being gladely is not a forset animal anymore and we want the fantasy to play its role.'
From the introductory paragraph: 'Producing a synthesis of elements in the kitchen gained through the analysis – whats the time.'
Somewhere near the end of the explanation, I think: 'The history of art has no critcal times at present in which the medium uses effects to result in new forms establishing their own decay times.'
And the clincher: 'Art is neither beautiful nor important, successfull at best, so a coincidence, an intrigue, effort and theatrical bollocks.'
If no other phrase is redeemable from this hallucinatory excuse for discourse, 'theatrical bollocks', at least, is. With as much pizzazz as it launched in the first place, CO-OP opened 'The Spirit is Not An Idea, Says the Penguin' and Johannesburg’s trendiest set suddenly appeared all at once as if they had simply seeped up through the cracks in the pavement in solidarity with their peers: Nils Eichberg, Jan-Henri Booyens, Cameron Platter, Dawood Petersen, Eunice Collective, Monique Pelser, Alexander Opper, BJ Engelbrecht and several others.
The works on show range wildly, from annotated drawings distantly derived from the work of David Shrigley (there is too much of this floating around these days) to architectural interventions to editioned arcade games. The latter, a work titled Skirt Invaders by photojournalist-turned-artist Nadine Hutton, is probably the most interesting contribution to the show, although it has nothing to do with penguins or the spirit. Skirt Invaders is a spoof of the vintage Japanese shooter game Space Invaders, which in recent years has made a comeback, particularly in indie fashion, high-end industrial design and, in South Africa, art. Dan Halter is probably better known than Hutton for working with the space invader character, a pixellated bug-like alien, and has recently exhibited a number of variations on the theme using carrier bags as pixels in giant assemblage constructions of the fictitious creature. In Huttons’ Skirt Invaders, the space invader aliens are replaced by Ndebele beaded dolls that approach the shooter character, represented by a Jacob Zuma icon. The idea as that Zuma, the character assumed by the player, shoots the approaching ‘skirts’ (the dolls) with his Umshini. If a doll gets to close to him, he loses a life. The game is displayed in the exhibition on a vintage arcade machine, which visitors to the exhibition are invited to try out. The satirical political narrative set up by Skirt Invaders is perhaps a little too obvious, but it is a great relief, in a show with no hope of coherence at any other juncture, to find a moment of clarity and humour.
On the other side of the spectrum, but still with very little to do with flightless fowl, is Alexander Opper’s installation with found dust and photographs, Accumulation #2. This work is a development of a different work installed at the Johannesburg Art Gallery for the recent exhibition Time’s Arrow: live readings of the JAG collection (which, coincidentally, I curated). Titled Accumulation #1, this earlier work is a drawing made using dust gathered from the cornices of the JAG. Accumulation #2 displays some of this same dust in a small glass vitrine, as if the dust is precious and should be preserved. Both instances of Accumulation look at dust as the material of historical tracing, and in this regard, dust, a substance we typically aim to expel from corners, is given the status of archive.
The presence of this work in 'The Spirit is Not an Idea…' is enigmatic, although along with the adjacent photographs, which document the cornices from which the dust was sourced, the work becomes a sort of architectural grafting. This notion is certainly more connected to Opper’s own artistic practice - which is gradually growing out of his experience as a professional architect – than anything else in the exhibition. However, the ghostly invigorating of history through dust does, at a stretch, suggest some sort of spirituality, or at least perhaps that ‘the spirit is not [just] an idea’.
Possibly the only work on the show that actually seemed to respond to the title or brief of the show was a large painting by Dawood Petersen titled The Daily Dawood. Visitors to this year’s Spier Contemporary exhibition will recognise the title from another work by this artist which featured amongst the finalists for the competition. In both cases The Daily Dawood is a fictional newspaper frontpage painted somewhat crudely and delivering stories loosely based on news in the real world. The edition of The Daily Dawood produced for this exhibition tells the story of a gay penguin couple whose sexual orientation causes a furore amongst officials at their zoo.
A Google search for 'gay penguins' yields 288 000 results, which suggests that this is rather a common phenomenon. However, the most recent incident involving gay penguins and worthy of international news was the discovery in June 2009 that a male penguin couple in a German zoo were raising a chick rejected by its biological penguin parents.
If it were not for CO-OP, this and countless other heart-warming stories of penguin love and tolerance might never have made it to my internet browser. This, and the opportunity provided for young artists to present their work in a commercial gallery with street credibility but without the usual red tape, makes 'The Spirit is Not an Idea, Says the Penguin', and probably everything else CO-OP will do, worthwhile.
