Archive: Issue No. 36, August 2000
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Cape 29.08.00 Stanley Pinker at the AVA 29.08.00 Lyn Smuts, Sophie Peters and Lien Botha at the Chelsea 15.08.00 'The Big Four' at the Brendon Bell-Roberts 01.08.00 Andrew Verster at João Ferreira
Gauteng
Durban
Publications
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Stanley Pinkler
Stanley Pinkler
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Stanley Pinker at the AVA
Stanley Pinker has been an integral part of the Cape Town scene for many years, known as one of the country's leading painters, once winner of the Cape Town Triennial, and represented in most major collections. For many years, he was also a popular and highly accomplished lecturer in painting at the Michaelis School of Fine Art. Though it is rumoured that he was only too happy to give up the burden of teaching when the time came some years ago, his considerable skills in that direction are attested to by a postcard from a former student, Marlene Dumas, now an international art star, sent shortly after her arrival in Amsterdam. "Dear Mr Pinker," wrote Dumas, "Still think you taught me the only thing worth knowing - 'struggle on'. Everyone can make something OK by chance, but can one continue making?"
The postcard from Dumas and fellow students is part of the display on the ArtStrip upstairs, a collection of photographs, postcards, and even letters from Lloyds Bank in London discussing the transfer of funds to Mr and Mrs Pinker during a residency in France, at Castagniers Alpes Maritimes. There are also a number of small watercolour sketches, some on doublespread pages removed from a sketchbook, and all displaying a remarkable sureness and lightness of touch. This insight into the life of a major South African painter is an act of generosity on behalf of the artist, and one which is being rewarded by the careful attention of absorbed viewers.
'Eine Kleine Introspective' is the title of this mini retrospective, and downstairs, in the Main Gallery, the space is filled with Pinker's more formal work - paintings and constructions, in which the sharp digs at officialdom in pieces like I must learn to whistle their tune remind one in spirit of Pinker's near-contemporary, Robert Hodgins. Pinker does not seem to date his paintings, so looking round at a show like this, it is not possible to see a chronological development. Some, like Quick, march comment obliquely on an oppressive society, some offer Pinker's unique take on landscape, while others seem more personal records. Throughout there is the fine drawing, the attention to the witty detail, and the pure enjoyment of colour.
Not to be missed. Until September 2.
AVA, 35 Church Street
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Lien Botha
Lyn Smuts
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'How the land lies' at the Chelsea Gallery
The classic ouevre of landscape painting and printmaking receives a new twist from three Cape artists, Lyn Smuts, Sophie Peters and Lien Botha in their well-titled exhibition, 'How the land lies'. Recent events to the north of our borders have brought into even sharper focus just how critical to the emotional health of the nation is the issue of land and who owns it. Peters, for instance presents a view across a valley to the mountains beyond, a boldly worked linocut, the lines of the vineyards creating a pleasing pattern of agricultural activity against the background of majestic mountains. Or so one reads the print until one glances at the title Endless wine land, with its hint of oppressiveness, and remembers the exploitative manner in which too many of the vineyards have been worked, even to the present moment. Sometimes Smuts, an etcher of high accomplishment, gives herself up to the landscape, and presents masterly sweeps of mountain, sky and land in pieces such as Jonkershoek. But in closer views, such as Ingozi - Gevaar - Danger a restrictive wire fence cutting right across the picture plane has forever separated the viewer from the mountain in the background. A further displacement from the land is suggested in two tiny etchings of the foetuses of an elephant and a monkey, beautifully worked in aquatint.
Botha's presents a series of 10 digital prints entitled Ten degrees of separation. Each shows the head and shoulders of young woman in tones of pinky sepia on the left, partnered by a fragment of landscape on the right. Variations on this head include two in which she is masked, one in which she has been cut out completely, and rather tritely, one in which musical notes hover in the air and another with paper doll type tabs at the shoulders. Who this woman is - an ancestor perhaps? - or what her connection to each piece of land is, or whether that really doesn't matter anyway, and the implication is that we have all become separated from our land and thus our essential selves is left for the viewer to puzzle out.
Until September 2.
The Chelsea Art Gallery, 51 Waterloo Rd, Chelsea-Wynberg, Cape Town
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The Big Four
The Big Four
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'The Big Four' at the Brendon Bell-Roberts
What do you get when four artists, two well known and two emerging, are let loose for a week in a gallery lined with large sheets of paper pinned on the walls with the avowed intent of all of the participants drawing on all of the sheets? This was the modus operandus decided upon by Wayne Barker, Barend de Wet, Claire de Jong and Elmi Badenhorst for their show, 'The Big Four', currently showing at the Brendon Bell-Roberts. Well, what you get is what you see. Large scale mixed media drawings which look like blowups from a sketchbook, with all of the spontaneous charm, but also the bits which didn't come off particularly well, on display. A sort of warts and all, take us as we are, approach. "There's drama and terribleness in every one of them", acknowledged Barker, at the opening, discussing the pros (a liberating sense of shared creative energy) and cons (Barker would have liked to have gone further with some of the pieces, but a joint decision making process was the order of the day) of the procedure. Probably the most successful of these, in which the elements combine with sufficient strength on the paper to warrant being framed for perpetuity, are Yellow Sands and White Splash. One with some stiffly drawn elephants being attacked by arrows should have been screwed up and thrown in the first year bin.
Tear shaped sections have been randomly cut out of some of the works and reappear on a wall at one end of the gallery, where they do nothing to activate that space. On the curved wall which is a focal point of the gallery is a long line of small framed images of humorously computer manipulated images of the four artists faces, a display which does hold the attention for a while. There are also Barker's trademark neon-tubed words, draped with strands of wool and hung in front of maps or cut up and reassembled rectangles of cheap Asian oil paintings, and on the floor, under a perspex cover, a random assortment of toys and other objects which despite being contained in plastic bags, passed their artistic sell-by several years ago.
'The Big Four' has its moments of wit and flash, but the truly disappointing aspect of the whole thing is that Barker and De Wet at least (the other two have yet to prove themselves) have produced cutting edge work of real strength in the past. This show feels like an exercise in self indulgence in which no one wished to work too too hard for too too long, but just have fun. The Big Four lite.
Until September 16.
Brendon Bell-Roberts Fine Art Gallery, 199 Loop Street, Cape Town
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Andrew Verster
Andrew Verster
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Andrew Verster at João Ferreira
I will not compliment Andrew Verster by saying that his new paintings are "too Indian". This has been one reaction which on the surface, seems disparaging, but, says the artist, it is a reaction which makes him feel good and confident about the work. Yes, the colours are bright and the patterns quite loud, but these, I think, are attributes of the work, the culmination of several trips Verster has made to India in the last few years. The artist has found these trips life-changing, and trips which seemed to have catalysed for him a marrying of traditions in this work. The paintings are also rooted much closer to home; in the 'suburbs of Bombay', which he imagines Durban could be if it had "more ambition".
The works are made to a fairly standard formula. Canvases, ranging in size from quite intimate to fairly large, have been prepared in a traditional way with several layers of Cadmium Yellow. Verster then paints fields and loose approximations of subjects in rich swathes of highly saturated colour, sometimes removing paint to model his images. He has not mixed any colours, preferring instead to use paint straight from the tube, and sourcing the highest quality pigments and colours for this purpose. Using a sharp instrument, Verster then draws and scratches pattern and images into this surface, revealing the strata of yellow beneath. His lines are delicate, accurate and whimsical and demonstrate an immeasurable sensitivity to pattern, shape and volume. But to describe the quality of his line goes a short way to describing the sensuality of the filigrees and forms it depicts. He has taken images from religious and votive Indian posters and set these against grounds of highly patterned and colour-saturated 19th Century Indian fabrics. To say that his colours are intense and saturated does little justice to the bold and intelligent interplay of tones and hues which are at work on these surfaces. A hand held in a traditional posture or mudra or a foot glimpsed beneath a sari are the humble subjects of most works. Described as such a fragment these images might seem prosaic and everyday, but this is not the case.
The most recent of the works on show are the Mantra series. If a mantra is understood as a device to break down the traditional dualistic subject/ object relationship- in which one perceives the world as outside and separate- this painting surely goes some way to further such an end. A patterned blue cloth is placed atop a bright orange field. A pink ground broadly describes the outlines of a hand in the purest pink. Pattern on the cloth is described by impasto marks in primary colours. Details of this motif and an exquisitely rendered hand are further picked out in a near-golden sgraffito. The orange, pink and blue offset one another, the impasto marks almost pulsate and the complex golden topography shimmers. The painting won't sit still in space; the languages of its rendering shift and move in and out of each other. The canvas creates an arena of its own, not on its surface, but in a wholly synthetic space.
Verster's rendering of simple partial images grants them a charged, sensual weight. Most works are called Sacred Fragments and for one of the first times in my life I can buy this sacredness. It's not flaky, it's not insincere and nor does it smack of the global cultural supermarket. I'm sure Verster will be accused of appropriating exotic religious images, but, as far as I am concerned, his integrity remains unquestionable. He will also be accused of creating decorative works. This is another insult he can weather, questioning the 'inferior' status of such art. Verster talks of the nature of time in Indian art and cultures, of its cyclical and non-linear aspects. The decorative arts of India, he argues, are the ideal language for the portrayal of such elusive ideas.
In two separate works from the Sacred Fragments series, Verster depicts a hand holding a lotus on a background of schematised marigolds. In India the pavements are heavily cracked, and in these cracks marigold petals from Hindu festivals collect. Seen in a certain light, Verster relates, these resemble veins of gold. On a painted blue ground we find a pink hand elegantly holding a pink lotus. The scratched lines raise small mounds of blue paint on either side which reflect light making it appear as if they are indeed gold. A series of erotic works, depicting partial glimpses of male nudes, some sexually aroused, play off against the quieter subject matter of the other works. Verster's highly descriptive line and rich, voluptuous colour is able to imbue simple, everyday subjects with a sensuality which is as tangible and charged as his most erotic depictions.
If only for its absolute formal perfection and daring this body of work is remarkable. Beyond that though, Verster is showing a group of paintings which truly enmesh disparate traditions and cultures and in so doing he also engages in a convincing debate about the nature of artmaking. The approach he chooses proves perfectly congruous with the ideas he broaches and issues the work throws up. What is truly remarkable though, is how, in approaching this work with only our senses, we are so convincingly persuaded.
Until August 26.
AVA, 35 Church Street, Cape Town
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Walter Oltman's wire screen
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Changing Screens at the Firs in Rosebank
The 'Changing Screens' project, initiated by designer Charles Storr in collaboration with Heather Greig, has been rumbling along the art world grapevine for some two years now. It finally saw the light last week in a series of evening events in the deserted Facts and Fiction shop in the Firs shopping centre, Rosebank.
Over the past two years, a number of artists and visually-creative types were approached to produce 'functional art' in the form of screens, inspired by the work of Italian design maestro Fornacetti. These were installed in the black plastic-clad walls of the empty shop. At the opening, Storr spoke (at length) about the neglect of art by all facets of the community and the importance of creating meaningful, long-term and gainful employment for artists.
After Storr's monologue, we were told to 'follow the man with the torch' -a dancer reminiscent of a malignant Rumplestiltskin. I suddenly felt like one of the rats following the Pied Piper. The Free Flight Dance Company, under the direction and choreographic skill of dance veteran Adele Blank, performed various vignettes relating specifically to the screens themselves, whether this was on a purely visual level or more tangential. An elegant tango was performed before Sam Nhlengethwa's equally-elegant screen of an interior, entitled Red Cushion. Norman Catherine's wildly bright microcosm of anthropomorphic figures lent itself brilliantly to an industrial soundtrack that had the dancers marching like frenzied automatons, and Walter Oltmann's wire screen was simply sublime.
While not all the screens were of equal standards quality-wise, it became very easy to be seduced by the multi-sensory combination of music, art, food and dance. I attended the first and last events -the first for serious VIPs and members of the media, and the last for the artists. I thought it might have been nice for these to have happened the other way around -there would have been no event if there were no artists to produce the screens in the first place. And why the separation of artists and potential buyers? Surely it would make more sense to have the artists there at all times? The evening was so full of romantic hyperbole that one would think the 'public' (who weren't quite the 'public' I had in mind) would be hard-pressed to refuse to make an offer to purchase if confronted by the creative talents responsible for the work.
While the initiative is an ambitious one with equally ambitious plans for the future, I had a lingering sense of unease that had partly to do with the rather cheesy atmosphere of the event and that the public, which Storr was apparently so keen on accessing couldn't actually see the show. It was not open during the day, and the evening event was by invitation only. Storr plans to take the show to London, where tickets will cost �200 per person. It certainly becomes clear that the 'public' he is interested are the public that can afford to buy art any day of the week. The screens are priced from R20 000 upwards, and the proceeds, after costs are recouped, will go into a artists' trust that will provide working grants to artists. A noble idea, but given the length of time this has taken to materialise, I'm not holding my breath just yet.
The exhibition ends August 10.
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Mark Dunlop
Mark Dunlop
Mark Dunlop
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Urban survival tactics
Mark Dunlop's debut solo exhibition 'As Above So Below' is critically informed by this artist's suburban subjectivity transposed onto an elegantly postmodern reading of urban space. On ascending the Market Theatre Gallery stairs, an ethereal video projection called Negotiable City pumps out 'To Let' signs that Dunlop has filmed around the metropolis. That the audience to which the show speaks, or at least the audience that has an appreciation for young, contemporary art, comes from the suburbs, is a revealing assumption on the part of the artist.
Negotiable City speaks about a feared space - the city as dead or deviant in some way. Decentralisation has seen those with financial means move out of the CBD to create a new, very affluent one in the north. The city is now up for grabs, as so many vacant spaces suggest. These spaces are being filled by a new demographic that the middle class would rather ignore, but the piece reads as a fascinating historical loop, harking back to the grab-mentality days of the goldrush. The action hasn't changed, just the means by which it happens. It also asks the question whether what is available is valuable, and to whom.
On the second flight of stairs, six monitors play back looped images of people getting on and off escalators, filmed at a range of different shopping malls in the city. The details, both architectural and in the amount of shopping bags people are carrying, would indicate a certain level of affluence and expendable income. Playing at different speeds, the videos are quite hypnotic in their banal recording of a simple action, but their level of intervention on the part of the artist, in terms of timing and placement, suggests a more metaphoric reading of the point of communion between urban geographies, consumer desire and social compulsion: it's all about ascending. At least, that's what they'd have you believe.
The show is titled 'As Above So Below', and an eponymous series of video-mediated photographic stills of Santarama Miniland in the south of Johannesburg cunningly distort one's sense of scale, simulation and reality. The mediation implies distance, but the monstrous presence of an actual lizard next to miniature people on the stairs of a simulated building is Godzilla-like.
In a visually simple but cannily-devised floor piece, Dunlop has stencilled the names of Johannesburg streets at the right angles where the floor tiles intersect, creating a grid structure echoing the manner in which the city itself is laid out. But look a little closer and you realise that in reality, Market does not intersect 'Risk' Street any more than Harrow intersects with 'No Suggestions', as this map would have you believe. Dunlop has repeated the same crafty exercise he gave us on 'Unplugged V', feeding names into a computer and letting spell-check do its thing. A brilliant take on semiotics, what emerges is the arbitrariness of naming, but also the happy accidents that can emerge when words, while visually similar, take on new inflections.
There is, in the exhibition title, a vague sense of the quasi-religious. The ways in which Dunlop portrays his readings of a violent and usually chaotic urban space are cool, minimalistic and rather detached, bespeaking an attempt to make sense of a space which for him, is a locus of paranoia.
The exhibition is made up of a series of signifiers that function as nodes by which your experience of the city is negotiated. As gallery manager and urban master Stephen Hobbs points out, the suburban sensibility of 'erasing' the inner city is revealed in the invitation image. An extreme low-angle shot of an icon in the emergency lane of the highway indicating 'no cars' is juxtaposed with an extreme high angle shot of the Brixton tower, effectively cutting out the horizon line altogether, "as if you cut out the body and all you're left with are the head and feet."
Photographs of the backs of blister-packed tranquilizer 'Urbanol' are titled Better Living Through Chemicals and Effects of Overdosage Not Specified, as the drug is generically packed with no contraindications specified. The line between coping and dying is a thin and blurry one.
From sound bytes of people answering questions about safety precautions they use when travelling through the city, or spaces they won't go to, to drugs specifically designed to relieve the stress of urban living, to a view of the actual city from the gallery window, this show is a sophisticated take on a flavour-of-the-month topic.
The exhibition ends August 10.
- Merryn Singer is a practising artist based in Johannesburg.
Camouflage Art.Culture.Politics nucleus johannesburg africa, 140 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood, 2193
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'Magic Moments' at the Johannesburg Civic
Although I am somewhat sceptical of shows that set out to "explore different aspects of the feminine", 'Magic Moments', curated by Minnette Vari, fortunately departs from the Judy Chicago Dinner Party kind of celebration of women that dominated the 1970s and 80s. Vari has included work by both male and female artists on the show and as well as using visual artists, has included an excerpt of text from Butterfly Burning by Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera, in black vinyl lettering on the wall. Both local and international artists are represented.
'Magic Moments' highlights the latest trend of artists using video work. Four of the six visual artists present work in this medium. The Civic Gallery has been transformed to accommodate this, with the back section of the gallery turned into two separate mini theatres showing two video projections, and the rest of the works in the front space. All of the videos on the show depend on sound, and the gallery, although altered, is small which results in a menagerie of different noises and makes it rather difficult to really focus on one work at a time. As last year's Vita awards taught us, having multiple video works with sound needs to be delicately negotiated.
This is particularly problematic when viewing Swiss artist Mo Diener's video projection Emmetropie, because it depends so much on the soundtrack featuring the voices of several different people, some male, some female, recounting aspects of their lives. Projected onto a large screen in one of the darkened rooms is a woman, bathed in blue UV light glowing luminously with iridescent white eyes and teeth. Halfway between a skeleton and an alien, this woman seems to be talking along to the soundtrack, which is difficult to hear because of interference from another video piece playing outside the room.
Magic Moments by Daniele Buetti, takes up the adjacent theatre space. It shows a tiny plastic ballerina twirling around on a spinning-top which fills the screen. The artist is following the pirouetting dancer, holding a tiny mirror, and cleverly plays with scale, between the artist's hand and the tiny objects. The music chosen for the soundtrack is a beautifully haunting piece by J.S. Bach, which essentially activates the imagery on the screen.
The front section of the gallery is painted a deep red, which really seems to work well in the space. One wall has been left white in order to accommodate Tracey Rose's Idle Eyes, made by drawing on the walls with eye blush. Rose has used pink and blue eye shadow and seems to have worked it onto the wall with her hands, leaving an abstracted blur of pearlescent colour.
Jan van der Merwe's Waiting fills most of this frontal area. Constructed from found material, rusted metal and bitumen, this monochrome sculpture and video installation brings to mind the absence, decay and longing in Miss Haversham from Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. Made up of three major parts - a cupboard made with barbed wire guards a woman's dress as well as a small child's, a single bed lies waiting with another dress almost melding into it. On one of the bed-posts is a wedding veil. On a chair, a net and lace negligee partly obscures a little monitor mounted in the seat. A repetitive mantra accompanies the video, which shows one hand continually caressing another.
Kathryn Smith's photograph from the Still Lives series adds an edge to the show with one of her corpse image/self portrait works, where she has projected the image of a corpse onto her own body. This work, showing only a face looming out of the blackness is reminiscent of a Victorian canon of photography with the image contained in a central oval surrounded by darkness.
The work that really steals the show is the video piece by Japanese artist Noritoshi Hirakawa. Entitled The Come and Go, it plays out a clever comedy/drama about men and women and relationships. The video depends on dancing as its main form of communication between the participants as the soundtrack for the work is a piercing tweeting sound, which penetrates the space around it and the video itself at irregular intervals. The music to which they are dancing, remains in the actors' heads. Not wanting to spoil the witty twist in the tale, let me say that the video is worth a visit.
As Vari's curatorial debut, it is an interesting exhibition, although it is not always clear to me what her intentions with the combination of artists and work on the show are. I do think that the show is worth a visit, and the gallery's extended hours make it convenient to do this after hours.
Magic Moments opened at the Johannesburg Civic Gallery on the 8th of August to coincide with National Women's Day and runs until the 30th of August 2000.
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Where did the road lead when it lead nowhere?
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Santu Mofokeng's 'Sad Landscapes' and 'Where did the Road Lead When it Lead Nowhere?'
It was really disappointing to walk into the opening of Santu Mofokeng's exhibition 'Sad Landscapes' at Camouflage to find it not yet installed properly in the space. The images were up, but the gallery still had ladders and text strewn about the place. Because the press release presented the show as being about making narratives, my first impulse was to think that this was a conceptual decision made by the artist - to allow the viewer to construct his own narratives for the work on the show, almost like a "choose your own adventure" novel in contemporary art. Needless to say, this was not the case, and after half an hour of standing around watching the artist hastily trying to get the work on the walls, I gave up and went home.
Despite the disastrous opening of the show, on second viewing I found aspects of it quite compelling. Mofokeng has used series' of black and white photographs of 'sad landscapes' taken from Vietnam, Holocaust death camps and Anglo Boer War camps from South Africa to explore the 'conflicting issues of the thin line between reality and metaphor, and memory and narrative'.
Some of the works are quite literal and depict easily read imagery, like mass graves and headstones, but the more successful works play on the banality of the images and the activation of these images by the accompanying text.
The photographs are all of similar sizes and formats, framed identically, and hung in groups, except for one large-scale photograph presented on a light box. The sites that have been chosen are listed and described next to each work, with encapsulating quotes or pieces of text narrating central themes for the groups. These texts question the nature of landscape and of land itself as constructs of empirical and cultural knowledge. The very idea of claiming, buying, selling and owning land is illusionary � borders, boundaries, markers - these are all based on what we know as opposed to what simply is. The irony of these �sad landscapes' is that it was the premise of this desire to control the land that these landscapes became sad at all.
I think that it is quite refreshing to see a South African artist dealing with these issues in a non-localised way. Someone at the opening asked me if the artist was Jewish, and when I replied that I didn't think so, she asked what his interest in the Holocaust was. This made me wonder about who is entitled to access these memories and landscapes, to traverse the physical and conceptual barriers that contain us and keep us in our 'place'.
Although the exhibition at Camouflage closed at the end of last month, Mofokeng made an interesting transition through Urban Futures, presenting just the large lightbox of deserted railway tracks disappearing into the distance, in a darkened room at MuseuMAfricA. The glowing presence of this rather outsized object works far more effectively as an evocative entity in this context than it did hung on a wall in the rather clinical space of Camouflage.
The exhibition ends August 10.
- Merryn Singer is a practising artist based in Johannesburg.
Camouflage Art.Culture.Politics nucleus johannesburg africa, 140 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood, 2193
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Hentie van der Merwe
Terry Kurgan
Claudette Schreuders
Claudette Schreuders
Berni Searle
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The Dolce Vita
When the Vita swung by a week after the chaos that was the opening of Urban Futures, I was exhausted but prepared. Despite being a contributor to the catalogue, I had little idea what to expect and really wanted to keep it that way. There's no use spoiling the surprise when so few still exist these days. So call me cynical.
Admittedly, I had certain mild reservations about this year's proceedings that mostly had to do with the judging panel still being exclusively Gauteng-based, despite being an all-new committee, comprising Julia Charlton, Clive van den Berg, David Koloane, Kagiso Pat Mautloa and Willem Boshoff. And the choice of artists seemed to reflect this new group's outlook - there was no enfant terrible factor to get anyone's hackles up, which is not entirely a bad thing. The truth be told, this year's show is one of the finest-looking to date.
You could put this down to there being four artists instead of six, which effectively increases their production budgets and allows them to maximise the potential of what is a notoriously difficult space. And the production budgets provided are enabling, although I would argue not enough for a competition that possesses the most clout and kudos in the country.
The main gallery space is entirely devoted to the work of winner Terry Kurgan and Claudette Schreuders. Hentie van der Merwe's photographic installation of a 'rewritten archive' of landscape, memory and desire (that requires one to negotiate the pitch-black space with a torch) and Berni Searle's three-screen video projection are in the two back spaces that have become synonymous with 'video work at the Vita'.
Kurgan's installation of large-scale, digital prints on silk organza, called Lost and Found, unequivocally steals the show. Even if the content of the work feels slippery, its aesthetic clout is at once overwhelmingly bold and quietly sublime. Although one can walk up the side bay of the gallery to the back spaces, you feel compelled to insert yourself between the cinematic, diaphanous layers of silk, and stare up at oversized people that loom like ghosts from a recent past. These are not detached, Victorian era photographs in black and white or sepia, but colour images from the 50's and 60's of formal and informal family interaction.
The technique references video projection, but the seductive melding of high and low tech gives this work its power that is simultaneously intimate and alienating. The further away you stand, the more 'solid' the figures appear to be. Move closer, and their presence wafts just beyond your grasp.
Like their faded and bleached source images, these prints are at the mercy of the changing light in the gallery throughout the day. Hung beneath skylights, the light deconstructs and re-forms the images between morning and afternoon. Interrelationships are achieved through the translucent layering, mapping memory in a way that I immediately identified with experientially - you can't isolate any one image to engage with it exclusively, except those perhaps right in the front or back. And the work also asks you to construct narrative in a completely non-linear way with no real direction towards 'truth'. Kurgan speaks about the generational images that spawned the Family Affairs show (for which she was nominated), as "so many veils". She has given form to these veils in an installation that is possibly her strongest work to date.
Hentie van der Merwe's work And Our Fathers That Begat Us delves into archives of a different sort, trying to insert himself and his sexual identity into a writing of history that has, for the most part, ignored it. There's an implicit catharsis involved in his process, but unfortunately, it doesn't succeed as an installation. The tried and tested intellectual concerns, imaged through arid Namibian and other landscapes, homoerotic shots of naked and semi-naked men in these landscapes and personal images can't offer us anything new in the work's current form, and the torches left me dissatisfied - like I was on a treasure hunt where the prize was not what was promised. It's a pity, because it's an area that has by no means been exhausted, but its treatment is simplistic and immediately revealing of the conceptual and intellectual concerns underpinning the work.
The juxtaposition of landscape and body finds a correlation in Berni Searle's video piece Red Pool, Blue Mark, Black Stain, from the 'Discoloured' series. The left screen depicts a quarry on Robben Island, in which an anonymous package wrapped in cloth floats across eerily still, red water. The center screen images disembodied, macroscopic close-ups of henna-stained hands, the black-purple whorls and wrinkles of fingertips and palms forming a wrought landscape of their own. Although a projection, the sound of a slide projector clicking over has been recorded, which aggressively cuts through the silence of the space. And on the right, a pair of hands records the process by which they became stained, working the henna powder into a paste in a bowl. I'm not sure whether this piece is as powerful as some of her earlier work, but the introduction of new vistas where the body is still so present, this time in its absence, is an interesting shift.
Walking back through Kurgan's veils, two exquisitely rendered pieces, Graveposts by Claudette Schreuders, demand attention. Based on an old family photograph, which Schreuders hung between the two works, she has taken the tradition of African grave posts and carved and painted a pair for dead, European relatives. If only all our cemeteries could attain this level of dignity without all the schmaltz.
The work is part of an installation called Belonging. Schreuders has always maintained that her work, while able to stand alone as individual pieces, should be read as a narrative. Placed in a strong triangular arrangement, Belonging is made up of four other sculptures: Melancholy is a male figure pointing at his navel, next to which is painted an African phrase; Sunstroke depicts a male figure lying prone on a blue-flowered bed, an angry, nail-encrusted dog growling menacingly at his feet; and Lost Girl is a Mami Wata/Eve figure, with a snake coiled around her mermaid-like waist. A small Christ-Like figure with a leopard-skin around his waist peers down on the group from the wall. There is a pervading sense of discomfort and awkwardness about their arrangement and interaction. Read alongside Graveposts, they become quite sinister. But her quest for a sense of identity and belonging that is not borrowed or enforced forms a strong complementary to Kurgan's piece and forms a powerful energy in the space.
July 18 - September 2
Sandton Civic Gallery, corner Rivonia Road and West Street, JHB
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Steven Cohen and Elu
Tradition
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Tradition: Steven Cohen and Elu at the NSA Gallery
The controversial work Tradition, now 'exposed' across the country, still disturbs. Unwelcome on the Vita dance circuit because of it, (the mess left on the 1999 Indaba stage meant that the slippage of meaning metaphorically embodied in the piece became disturbingly literal for the forty-three protesting ballerinas who came after him) Cohen has to seek out alternative spaces to perform.
Testing the limits of audience tolerance with its use of a German scatalogical pornographic video as a backdrop, Tradition sees Cohen in his hallmark S & M gear, complete with gemsbok horn fetish shoes, swinging high above the gallery floor. Below Elu, dressed in a revealing tutu, hovers and dances on point. In the background Tradition from 'Fiddler on the Roof' plays. Spiraling slowly above, Cohen deliberately gives himself a number of enemas and then proceeds to release them over Elu. Spattered and besmirched Elu waits to catch Cohen as he falls.
Julia Kristeva, in a response to the elements of shock in much contemporary art speaks of a 'state of crisis and fragmentation'. Audiences often either repress this by refusing to acknowledge it, in which case they either don't come or they find the works disgusting or stupid and wonder why the curators bothered. She suggests that audiences begin to ask some fairly straightforward questions such as 'Why do they do this? What are the experiences behind these objects, objects which work with the impossible, with the disgusting, the intolerable?'
Kristeva's term for the disgusting and the intolerable, the 'abject', has become a particularly useful one for categorising and analysing a certain type of artistic production. The 'abject' is anything that threatens a coherent system - in the case of the body it is anything that escapes the body. Body waste, in particular, is abject: blood, faeces, urine, sweat, tears, semen, vaginal juices all constitute that which is detritus, that which threatens or is released from the limits of the body.
Kristeva points out that the state of abjection reflects our own position; the reason we react so strongly against it is that it constitutes us: waste, excrement, a corpse - it threatens us because it reminds us of what we are and will become. Shock, horror, disgust impinge on our sense of ourselves, creating a sense of crisis as our sense of completeness and comfort is threatened. For the artist this is important because it opens up communication - communication about the malaise from which we find ourselves suffering.
Our malaise is complacency or habit of thought (tradition), from which we need to be shocked because the consequence of conformity is often exclusion, both mental and social. The marginal, is as much a part of our society as the supposed norm. Whilst appearing nihilistic then, Tradition is, in fact, accompanied by a search for meaning and it is up to the spectator to make the connection for themselves.
When the fall finally comes at the end of Tradition a curious, unexpected, reversal occurs - it is the figure of 'tradition' who catches and saves the iconoclastic Cohen from injury providing an ending open to interpretation.
- All Kristeva quotes from: Morgan, Stuart and Morris, Frances (1995) Rites of Passage - Art for the End of the Century Tate Gallery Publications, London.
N S A Galleries, 166 Bulwer Road, Glenwood, Durban, South Africa, 4001
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Kathy Coates & Azwhimphelele Magord
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Hayani: Six artists from the Northern Province
and Kathy Coates in Crossing'
Samson Mudzunga created a ritual resurrection at the recent NSA opening of
the Venda show Hayani�. Reborn from the interior of his great tree
drum/coffin carved in the shape of a rocket with fins of a woman and fish
flanking it, Mudzunga emerged from the tail� of the rocket through a small
door without much ceremony or ostentation. Given the mythology and media
hype that has been created around this performance artist� from Venda the
unspectacular nature of his rebirth� was somewhat surprising. Mudzunga was
buried� at the sacred Lake Fundudzi and was purported to remain
underground, buried alive until his renascence. Whilst the media have
focused on the spiritual and physical endurance of such an act Mudzunga now
acknowledges the purely symbolic� nature of his piece and happily pops in
and out of the rocket for any interested party. Whilst this might
disappoint many seeking a cathartic response from a authentic� ritual the
real power of the work lies in the drum itself. Monumental in its form and
presence it resonates with an indisputable strength missing from the actual
performance.
In Hayani� (the Venda word for home�) curator Kathy Coates attempts to
rectify many exhibitions� tendency to decontextualise works from their site
of production. Despite providing supporting documentation, both visual and
verbal, the show on this level, perhaps inevitably, fails, but on another
is remarkably satisfying. Noria Mabasa, Jackson Hlungwane, Avishoni
Mainganye, Phillip Rikhotso and Albert Munyai all have a long history and
are artists of stature - popularised in the eighties and then highly
marketable many of them faded from public view as the market moved on to
the next trend. The artists, however, remained. Hayani� allows the
diversity of their work to be seen again.
Mabasa, now accepted by her male peers as a wood carver in her own right,
presents Inkatha - an entire bole of a tree carved as a dancing circle of
figures. Rikotso finds cheerful and disturbing characters in his painted
wood pieces whilst Avhashoni Mainganye, keen to establish a creative centre
in Venda so that people may come and see the work produced in situ (so the
folly of the dismantling of Hlungwane�s New Jerusalem may not happen
again), works with found objects, collaging the world in both two and three
dimensions. Albert Munyai, visionary and traditional healer and one of the
few artists to replant the trees in the greatly denuded landscape of Venda,
disconcerts with his Cow marimba; a strange, dessicated creature of music.
Perhaps it is only Hlungwane, represented here by smaller works which feel
fragmentary, who is not evident in his power.
Coates� own installations under the title Crossing� lack resolution. Her
strength, lies in her powers of collaboration; Time Capsule made with
Azwhimphelele Magoro is a intriguing wooden carving of a rocket inset with
little cavities, each containing a Venda sculpture. Her true success,
however, lies in curating an exhibition that brings to light the power of
the sculptors of Venda once more in a show that demands more than one
visit.
Exhibition closes August 31, 2000
N S A Galleries, 166 Bulwer Road, Glenwood, Durban, South Africa, 4001
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Jane Alexander
Amir Nour |
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The Oxford History of Western Art edited by Martin Kemp et al.,
On first appearance, this recently published tome seems much like other stock 7cm thick General History of Art Volumes that one is used to finding in reference sections of libraries everywhere. This type of book is standard fare for students and scholars rushing to finish assignments or studying for exams. The layman might invest in such a book in his or her younger years and end up dipping into it every so often to brush up on art general knowledge. Every now and then such a reader might go on a touristic visual journey through passed centuries of cultural production by flipping through the book from cover to cover but seldom engaging with the text. We've all done it. Often these volumes are used way beyond their shelf life, having been left behind by contemporary theory and practice, or by better quality, more up-to-date printing methods.
Compared to such works (for example older editions of Frederick Hartt's Art: A History of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, H.W. Janson's History of Art and the much-dreaded Gardener's Art through the Ages), The Oxford History of Western Art , on closer inspection, boasts some definite progress and revisions. Even the cover design, for example, hints at a more post-modern stance and varied points of view by including seven quite different examples of western art in a grid. It always has puzzled me how authors/ designers manage to choose one solitary image to represent the massive body of knowledge contained inside such volumes( in Hartt's case it is a Caravaggio image, Gardener uses Coreggio's Jupiter and Io and so on) but here it is clear from the outset that "history" is relative and that Hockney or Barbara Kruger have as much place in it as a 14th century diptych or stained glass window.
On the back cover, the book claims to give " a radical and stimulating overview of the 2,700-year story of the western world's vast artistic heritage...". and from glancing over the contents page it seems that it might just fulfill this promise. This history has been grouped into five main sections along socio-political lines as opposed to the more traditional art "movements" . Greece and Rome are seen as "The Foundations". Part Two, "Church and State", clearly introduces issues of power and the importance of Christianity in art production of the Middle Ages. The High Renaissance and Baroque is under the umbrella "The Art of Nations: European Visual Regimes 1527-1770" . "The Era of Revolutions 1770-1914" refers not only to political change but formal and technological advances in this period.
Having studied and taught History of Art at High School and tertiary level, I have witnessed the manner in which these books are often used. The interested student will more often than not turn to see what the most contempory art work in the book is. If it was made more than five years ago they seem disgruntled, longing for something fresher. The wonderful thing about Kemp et al's version is it has lots of contemporary work - more than a third of the book is dedicated to the 20th century. The final section is called 'Modernism and After 1914- 2000' and includes small but clear introductions to 'Alternative Media', 'Photography' and 'Post modernism', amongst other areas. The obvious examples are of course included (Richter, Hirst, Koons, Kruger and Holzer) but I was excited to find reproductions of other recent artist's work (that of Cornelia Parker, Ian Hamilton Finley, Mona Hantoum, and even the Neue Slowenische Kunst). I did wonder why there where little or no references to or images of work by Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Wolfgang Tillmans, Chris Ofili, just to mention a few of what I would think to be obvious omissions.
Having studied and taught History of Art at High School and tertiary level, I have witnessed the manner in which these books are often used. The interested student will more often than not turn to see what the most contempory art work in the book is. If it was made more than five years ago they seem disgruntled, longing for something fresher. The wonderful thing about Kemp et al.'s version is it has lots of contemporary work - more than a third of the book is dedicated to the 20th century. The final section is called "Modernism and After 1914- 2000" and includes small but clear introductions to "Alternative Media" "Photography" and "Post modernism", amongst other areas. The obvious examples are of course included (Richter, Hirst, Koons, Kruger and Holzer) but I was excited to find reproductions of other recent artist's work (that of Cornelia Parker, Ian Hamilton Finley, Mona Hantoum, and even the Neue Slowenische Kunst). I did wonder why there where little or no references to or images of work by Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Wolfgang Tillmans, Chris Ofili, just to mention a few of what I would think to be obvious omissions.
Also included in Part Five are a number of sections on art from traditionally less western parts of the world, politically correctly named "Alternative Centres". I would have liked to have seen a more extensive set of images in these chapters, which briefly focus on The Soviet Union, Latin America, India, Canada, Australia and the African and Afro-Carribean. It is clear, however, that this book is not meant to be a complete and utter history of all art production ever and I think ultimately this is probably a good thing. The African and Afro-Carribean section seems mainly aimed at introducing the impact of modernism on such artists rather than attempting any general history of African Art production -an undeniably mammoth area of research that needs plenty of space to be correctly represented
I must of course make mention of the fact that the only piece of South African work that appears is the ever moving Butcher Boys by Jane Alexander. It seems fit to me that this stands as a good example of art work from this country that could fit within a Western Art context albeit not the only one that could have been chosen. Alexander's use of traditional realist sculpting techniques strikes resonance with Classical sculpture , such as the image of a Centaur and lapith fighting -a section of bas relief from the Parthenon- reproduced in the chapter on Greek Sculpture. Her work has always gone beyond the rhetoric of an African or national style, which makes it both ironic and yet fitting for her work to be reproduced here in beautiful A5 size colour.
The final chapters in this section, "Art History", "Art Museums and Galleries" and "Critics and Criticism", give a valuable overview of these important areas which are all too often left out . The main "players", venues and dates are outlined, and in some cases illustrated (an amazing interior view of Bilbao). What is importantly emphasised to the reader is that many other factors are involved in continually changing the boundaries of the art world: not just the actions of the deified artist and his or her work.
Finally, there is a wonderful Epilogue, which I am sure most readers unfortunately will never look at (as is the fate of the Preface, Introduction and Acknowledgement most of the time!). Kemp attempts to link images from the opening chapters with those in the concluding pages, in some way trying to point to the continuing threads of power, ownership, aesthetics and so on that have run through western art making for centuries.
If you are studying, or just looking for a comprehensive overview, I would recommend this as a good investment either to buy or to use in your local biblioteek. The images are brilliant and the text seems much clearer than most. But as a teacher I recommend you to use it only as a starting point and to keep cross-referencing: sooner or later it too will unfortunately date.
- Julia Clark is a Cape Town based artist, curator, and art teacher.
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