Archive: Issue No. 38, October 2000
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Cape 24.10.00 Alan Alborough at the University of Stellenbosch Gallery 24.10.00 Peet Pienaar at the Brendon Bell-Roberts 24.10.00 'Ubudoda: Images of Masculinity' at the AVA 24.10.00 Musa Xaba at the H�nel Gallery 24.10.00 Robin Rhode in performance at the National Gallery 17.10.00 Mark Hipper, Jeno Gindl and Leora Farber at João Ferreira 10.10.00 'Returning the Gaze' at the Cape Town Festival 10.10.00 Leora Farber, Mark Hipper and Jenö Gindl at João Ferreira 10.10.00 Francine Scialom Greenblatt at the AVA 03.10.00 'Collaborations' at Bell-Roberts Contemporary Art 05.09.00 Sanlam New Acquisitions Gauteng 24.10.00 Marc Chagall in Johannesburg 17.10.00 Clive van den Berg's 'Memorials without Facts: Ghosts' 10.10.00 Urban Opera par excellence 03.10.00 Robin Rhode's 'Living in Public' 19.09.00 Trading Outposts: 'Trapped Reflections' at the African Window and 'Outpost' at the Association of Arts, Pretoria International 17.10.00 'Art in the World 2000' - a participant's account 17.10.00 'Art in the World 2000' - a viewers account
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Alan Alborough
Alan Alborough
Alan Alborough
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Alan Alborough at the University of Stellenbosch Gallery
Alan Alborough has titled neither the exhibition nor the pieces on this show at the University of Stellenbosch Gallery. Typically, he has said nothing at all. The viewer, I guess, is supposed to extrapolate. While there may be a little of "it's whatever you want it to be", I reckon that Alborough is talking another language, one which strikes at the very heart of anyone's attempt to interpret his work. One tendency, when looking at his work, is to very literally liken its appearance to something else. One can also look at the processes he employs and the materials he uses and attempt to extract some meaning. Somehow, I believe, such interpretation both falls short of and overshoots the mark. Alborough instead questions the very notion of our perception of his work. Through his unfamiliar constructions and combinations, Alborough initiates an unstoppable process in a viewer - one cannot help but attempt to interpret his work; visually, verbally and intellectually. Our perception longs for a landmark in the slippery and uncertain landscape of Alborough's installations. Without a referent we seem unable to experience his work.
A persistent and chaotic metallic sound drifts down from the gallery above your head as you enter the exhibition space. On the floor in front of you is a construction which clearly reproduces the tracery of the pointed-arch windows lining either side of the building (a converted church), although these are covered to prevent much light coming in (I suspect a little less light would lend more ambience to the show). On the low podium at the far end of the building is a similar construction which mirrors the simple rose window behind you. Nothing too out of the ordinary yet. Light, however, is provided by lights rigged inside opaque white plastic toolboxes. There is in fact, nothing too unusual about the materials Alborough has used to fabricate the constructions before you either - injection-moulded shower mats, cable ties, plastic cotton reels and the protective plastic caps from roofing nails. Unusual and original though is the use to which these materials are put and their apparently coincidental compatibility. The aforementioned plastic caps fit snugly between nodes on the plastic mats; these are pierced by long nails that fit neatly through the centre of the cotton reels which hold the plastic mats one above the other. This makes a plastic sandwich, drooping slightly on the corners where it is unsupported.
Wire joins the protruding nails above, which also hold the constructions off the floor, resting on absorbent sheets of white non-woven fabric placed there. The rose window-like form rests on the fabric, which has been soaked in a solution and the connected nails have a current passing through them into the layered sheets. This causes the nails to corrode, making a loose rendering of the image they demarcate in metallic grey and red colours, which spread aureole-like around the nails. It is an amplified recording of this corrosion process, a sort of metallic crackling, which we are listening to. Eventually a blurred, bleeding reproduction of the rose window will be produced, and will, I presume, be exhibited, possibly over the very window from which the form is derived. Alborough will do the same with the other constructions. The images will still retain traces of the nails in position in stains whose tone and hue change as they drift away from the nail head. The symmetry of the rose window image and the nature of the marks, making it up, seem to hint at the famous marks of a Rorschach test. This, I believe, is a red herring Alborough places in our way, inviting us to comparison, metaphor and likeness in interpretation of his work.
In the other large room of the gallery, Alborough has placed a long sheet of absorbent paper. On this is an arrangement of straight lines, circles and semi-circles. These are made of blue or white plastic clothes pegs, cable ties, nails and wire. The image the units make is like that on the invitation - apparently a circuit-like configuration of paths, nodes and ports. To resort to the use of metaphor, this seems to allude to the current that eventually passes through this construction causing the corrosion and making the images I have described above on the paper. Themes seem to run through the show - accumulation, current, flow, exchange between negative and positive, amongst others. The chaotic soundtrack and the relatively uncontrolled nature of the corrosion the works produce stand out against the highly ordered nature of the materials Alborough uses, the complexity and rigorousness of his constructions, and the elaborate choreography he goes through to realise his works. One is drawn to the cliché "Rust never sleeps", but this is perhaps another decoy laid by the artist to entice us to use metaphor in description of his work. The themes around which Alborough may have constructed this work are not specific, but rather general and universal - the co-existence of negative and positive, order and disorder, entropy and growth are really subject to any number of interpretations.
Alborough's work is also confounding in the way in which it straddles function and aesthetics. Why is such acute aesthetic attention given to what is essentially a machine to produce images? Why does something so apparently carefully considered and beautiful need to function? Which is really the product? Do the toolboxes function as lights or the lights moonlight as toolboxes? Alborough of course offers no clues, nor seems to claim any more attachment to any one part of the process. Are the machines in the service of Alborough, does a subject produce an object in which process the machine is intermediary? Perhaps the work is pure function, independent of agent and product, and perhaps it is pure aesthetic independent of reference. Although this seems impossible to grasp, perhaps it offers a clue to a reading of Alborough's work. It aims to bypass interpretation by reference, metaphor, aphorism symbol or subjectivity. It seeks to stand completely independent of subjective pointedness but remains aesthetically acute and functionally precise.
These large and elaborate constructions are beautiful, confounding and revelatory. They shed light on the tools of interpretation we are so accustomed to using, drawing attention to the devices we rely on to interpret images, objects and processes. At the exhibition's opening, the gallery was full of people which seemed to negate the intimacy the work really needed - I would really have loved an opportunity to not think about it by myself.
The show closes on November 11
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Peet Pienaar
Peet Pienaar
Peet Pienaar
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Peet Pienaar at the Brendon Bell-Roberts
With all the hoo-haa over Peet Pienaar's initial proposal which led to his exhibiting not at the AVA but at the Brendon Bell-Roberts, (see Mgcineni Sobopha's review of 'Ubudoda' in this issue), I expected to enter the gallery and find a darkened space with a dismayingly large video projection of the delicate operation in question being screened at one end. Preview shots had already been circulating on the internet.
Outside, the windows are pasted over with posters for the show, and on top of these, the red FOR SALE and TO LET signs - key to Pienaar's thinking for his show 'I want to tell you something' - have caused so many patrons to drive on by, that the gallery has had to paste up a number of OPEN signs to counteract these. But entering the gallery, the video is not immediately visible. Instead, scraps of images - words, an orange coat, helmeted heads, a kitchen interior with a bowl of oranges, a row of tilted Coke bottles, a bitten ice cream bar - have been uniformly framed in white wood and are hanging on the walls in un-gallery like positions - in clumps, up near the ceiling, down at floorlevel. So considered does this randomness seem, that one imagines the artist must have had a model of the gallery to decide on precise placement, the way Gilbert & George do. The colours are bright, upbeat. The subjects could be seen as vaguely phallic - in the way the ad industry uses such imagery to sell products. All of them are sections of vinyl posters discarded by the printers.
Discarded, cut, reframed for a new commercial purpose and moving on around the corner of the gallery, one is finally face to face with a three monitor video installation of the Pienaar penis having its foreskin cut off in spine chilling closeup. The fact that the artist is two steps away laughing and joking and clearly quite O.K. does nothing to dispel the cold queasiness induced by this sequence. The second monitor is alternating FOR SALE/TO LET signs from the upmarket Pam Golding Estate Agents, and on the third screen, a hand opens a carton of Clover milk.
The end product of the circumcision, probably by now the most famous foreskin in the history of the country, is a tiny deflated heap of pale skin in the bottom of a small bottle of formaldehyde, itself on display in a small wall-mounted perspex case. Restrictions on selling body tissues on the internet stymied the original plan to auction the foreskin on the web, and it is now for sale as part of the video installation.
Not for nothing does Pienaar hold the post of Creative Stimulator at the hot ad agency, the Jupiter Drawing Room. In processing his original concept for a new venue, he seems to have moved away from his original and highly controversial idea of reinforcing his African heritage by undergoing the ritual of circumcision - or has he?
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Andrew Porter
Shaheen Merali
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'Ubudoda: Images of Masculinity' at the AVA
'Ubudoda: Images of Masculinity', currently on at the AVA, explores dualities, complexities and social constructions of male identity through the work of four British and four South African artists: Jeremy Mulvey, Timo Lehtonen, Shaheen Merali, Ben Joiner, Clive van den Berg, Thembinkosi A. Goniwe, Andrew Porter, and Zwelethu Mthethwa.
From Van den Berg's Don't fly too high video projection to Lehtonen's series of mixed media drawings with their cross-cultural references, Ashurbanipal's Dream, these works scrutinise the complexities of male identity, albeit to the exclusion of female artists' voices. Masculinity has, of course, played a key part in the orthodox narratives of contemporary art, and there has been a tendency to write out of its discourse female artists, especially those of non-European descent. It is ironic to note that at this moment in our history, one finds no female artist participating in an exhibition such as this, as masculine constructed identities do not exist without the feminine. It seems as if we are living in a society that has burned its bras while still wearing the Victorian corset. For a "man" to achieve masculine identity, the perception is necessary that not only does he have sexual relations with women (a perception brought into question by Van den Berg's video, which looks at love between men), but also that he is active. Thus, for men the active role is constructed or marked normative and quintessentially masculine. The Xhosa use of the word ubudoda with its derivative adjectives and adverbs with specific nuance, evokes the image not only of a biological male but of a "real man" who lives up to his culturally constructed/defined role.
Nevertheless, Porter's paintings express the complex social influences of popular culture, rituals and their absence in our modern society and the notions of conforming to certain standards, while Mulvey's series of ovals depict "the odds and ends of everyday professional manhood adrift, exploring late industrial anxieties about gender roles". In the main gallery space; Mthethwa's prints seem to be contesting the space dominated by the larger than life size white inflatable golliwog seated squashed uncomfortably under the mezzanine floor, provoking thoughts of slaves in galleys. Merali's piece entitled It's cheap to run critically interrogates canonised stereotypical images of black maleness in English popular culture (the 'golliwog' is derived from a 1950s logo for a brand of jam). Mthethwa's Black men and masculinity series of giclee prints on canvas, 'explore the parameters of men's relationships to one another and questions of how traditional environments view the role of men'; as protectors, family providers who are expected to be emotionless and show unwavering bravery in dire times. Mthethwa's work is questioning these notions and "examine how capitalism has subsided traditional roles and struggle for those caught in the crossfire as participants".
We are living in a rapidly changing social world, conventions of any particular situation are increasingly becoming unclear and challenged. Not a stranger to controversy, Goniwe who raised concerns on Peet Pienaar's proposal to be circumcised in the gallery by a black female doctor as his submission for the 'Ubudoda' exhibition was later accused of censoring Pienaar. Goniwe found Pienaar's appropriation of the Xhosa ritual of ulwaluko problematical, and accused him of power mongering in his intention to use a female black doctor to circumcise him. This led to a public debate and in the end to Pienaar being excluded from participating in the 'Ubudoda' exhibition. Goniwe takes on the controversial and thorny issue of traditional African ritual practices and their relevance in urban setting. Entering the first room of the gallery, the viewer is confronted with Goniwe's Communication XYZ dealing with scarification, cutting of the finger and circumcision ritual. This video projection captured my interest as I watched many viewers' reactions during the opening. The work received only perfunctory attention from a critical establishment ill prepared to deal either with the artists' preoccupation or with his background. Goniwe's work in a form of aesthetically direct speech is disturbing not only to circumcised African males but also to those viewers who seek the contemplation of art/objects in order to escape from people/ "reality". When speaking about his work Goniwe states that he applies different contemporary media for "better ways of expressing meanings that can be easily read but provocative".
Communication XYZ is excessively confrontational and controversial, especially to Xhosa circumcised males. One male viewer said "even though I am unused to art as an experience of cultured minds and active engagement with controversial issues, for me the appropriation of communal rituals (Xhosa) in the name of art of this kind is offensive. It makes one wonder what contemporary art is and all about? This guy is playing with fire here, especially at a time when circumcision ritual practice has become a controversial issue". Communication XYZ is done intentionally to elicit reaction, to engage and provoke response calculated and anticipated to benefit in the long run. It scrutinises and pushes the boundaries of what has heretofore been "acceptable" subject matter for artists by calling attention to the problems and the use of the body and identity politics that are relevant to African ritual practices.
Until November 4.
AVA, 35 Church Street
- Mgcineni Sobopha, is a fine art graduate of the University of Cape Town, currently studying for a masters degree at the Michaelis school of fine Art. His email address is sbpmgc01@hiddingh.uct.ac.za or
msobopha@hotmail.coms.
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Musa Xaba
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Musa Xaba at the H�nel Gallery
"The visualisation of a feeling" could perhaps describe the process of making many an artwork, and this is what Musa Xaba subtitles his exhibition 'Remembering my Dream'. This can, of course, be done with varying degrees of success, which Xaba's exhibition achieves in some departments while not faring so well in others: he manages to realise images quite successfully, but I'm not convinced by the content of his dreams. Xaba was born in Durban, where he studied at Technikon Natal, and has lived and worked in Cape Town since 1993. This is his first one person show, and as such he must be commended for a bold début.
The show consists of black and white figurative drawings, well framed and on a moderate scale. The images range from larger portrait-like works to smaller figures. Xaba employs a bold technique involving laying down a dark ground on which he works, removing with an eraser in parts and embellishing in others with directional marks. In two adjacent works, both entitled Comrades, Xaba depicts Mandela and Chairman Mao in this manner. The large heads and shoulders stand out against a consistent grey background. Their faces are completely scored by vertical eraser marks leaving only a bare trace of their features. The form of Mandela's head and Chairman Mao's characteristic hairline provide just enough clues for a viewer to reassemble their features in a familiar way. The works muse on the legacy of these political giants, and ponder their memorialisation in image form.
Other works, such as Dreamgirl, are perhaps not as strong. Xaba in his statement which accompanies the show speaks of "The exterior vision of an interior world" and I would speculate that the above work is just that. A large flowing, unspecific portrait drawing may well feature in Xaba's interior world, but I'm not sure it features quite so strongly in a viewer's. I find that in the works which are ostensibly more private, a viewer feels slightly excluded and I'm not sure that Xaba is too comfortable with these works as I find them formally less strong. The marks he has made don't seem to say as much or to say it as confidently. There is one curious work entitled 'Telling a Dream'. Depicting a pupil-like sphere seen inside the jaws of a shark, its symbols seem less obvious, more intriguing and indicate something which Xaba may find fruitful to explore. Xaba's work is most successful, formally and intellectually, when he investigates not only the objects of his interior world but the process by which they arrive there and by which they are extracted and rendered.
The show closes on November 30
H�nel Gallery, 84 Shortmarket Street, Cape Town
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Robin Rhode
Robin Rhode
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Robin Rhode in performance at the National Gallery
The first thing I noticed about Robin Rhode is that he was not wearing the Johannesburg artist's de riguer black clothes. He was, rather, dressed in primary colours - red hat, yellow top, blue jeans and shoes. This, against the black and white drawing he made on the wall, put me in mind of Mondrian. The formal references made by this stood in stark contrast to Rhode's relative casualness and the informality of his performance. He interrupted his short attempts at mounting the upside down charcoal bicycle he had drawn on the wall with jokes and comments made to the small audience and a photographer.
Rhode's work has consistently made reference to art history and the rough neighbourhoods of his upbringing in the same breath. His work characteristically involves him interacting, often fruitlessly, with a charcoal drawing he has made on a wall. These drawings have their roots as much in San rock painting as scrawls on public walls. The recurrent image of a bicycle refers to a high school initiation ritual he experienced where young boys were made to climb onto a bike drawn onto the wall of the school toilet. The transformative states depicted in San rock art might well depict as extreme a change of consciousness as what would be required to climb aboard a two-dimensional rendering of a bicycle. The process of learning and initiation are also recurrent in his work and the awareness of art history which his work maintains becomes more important when you notice the regularity with which Rhode points out that there was no art education at his high school. I made a curious connection when I saw him preparing his wall drawing of a bicycle. Taking a small charcoal depiction of a bike from his sketch pad, he turned it upside down and copied it this way onto the wall. I was reminded of an exercise in a book entitled Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain which is often used by people, untrained in art, to teach themselves to draw by copying an image upside down.
Rhode's interaction with his drawings and reference to art history in these performances also reflect the movement from the public walls of his upbringing and the neighbourhoods into the formal, traditional space of the art gallery. The difficulties and frustrations of his actions reflect the deep chasm between the two as well, I suspect, as the contradictory feelings he harbours about that transition. His works often reveal an irreverence for the art institution while happily adopting its conventions and conveniences. While at the SANG Rhode repeated a work he had earlier performed at the Rembrandt Gallery. Drawing a urinal, this time signed R. Moet, he walked up to it and took a leak in the gallery. Duchamp's oft-quoted readymade is given an even further irreverent twist. It would be a mistake though to make heavy weather of Rhode's art historical references while ignoring the delinquent schoolboy. He claims that many of his actions simply "have to be done" and that he has no regard for the consequences.
Rhode is engaging, articulate and entertaining and his work contains carefully and accurately culled images, actions and circumstances. He manages to situate himself comfortably in art history's vast trajectory and explore issues pertinent to his personal and social situation while producing works in an area which is both highly accessible and very sophisticated at the same time. He details this slow and ambivalent entry into the formal and historical art-making context in a both witty and original way.
Rhode is artist-in-residence at the SANG until November 12 where he will be performing and interacting with visitors at the following times:
Thursday November 2, 12 p.m. - 1 p.m. at the Slave Lodge in Parliament Street
SANG, Government Ave, Gardens
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Leora Farber
Mark Hipper
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Mark Hipper, Jeno Gindl and Leora Farber at João Ferreira
Mark Hipper's superbly carved wooden male body masks with their cheekily outrageous erections pointing in all directions (Cape Times columnist Stanley Hermans expressed an urge to acquire one for use as a hat stand) line up on the far wall of the Joao Ferreira Fine Art Gallery. So smooth, so sensuous is the wood, one finds oneself inadvertently repressing the urge to caress the curving forms. Flanking this line-up is a series of large platinotypes by German artist Jeno Gindl of still life subjects. Here, the subject of the image - a female body, clothing, tulips (Hermans' comment here was that even if these weren't penises they looked like them) seem secondary to the forms and the wonderfully rich tones of grey to black achieved by the classical platinotype process. Gindl works by coating Fabriano paper with photographic emulsion, and making contact prints directly from his outsized negatives.
In 'Endless Renovations', which, says the artist, "explores the body's relation to technological disciplines, in particular medical science and the practice of cosmetic surgery", Leora Farber presents work from two different series. In the older work, wax and paint is utilised to simulate a layer of flesh, then this flesh-like material is used to construct make-up boxes or containers for surgical tools, or in the largest piece, a woman's suit, complete with intricate dressmaking detailing of hooks and eyes. There is something curiously dead about these pieces, and maybe that it is intentional, but I think it has more to do with the fact that the work seems closed, didactic. Once one has grasped the metaphor, there seems little more to gain from the work than admiring the ingenuity of the artist.
Farber's video and the lightboxes holding video stills seem more open-ended. Her video 4 Minor Renovations (revamp, refurbish, retouch,refine) in which four cosmetic surgical operations are filmed in-close up achieves a sometimes almost unbearable tension between beauty - the smooth, fluid movements of the gloved hands as they go about their work to a background track of classical music, the saturated ruby reds and emerald greens of the image - and stomach churning revulsion. Flaps of flesh seem disconcertingly misplaced, and a nipple on a skinless breast looks obscene. "In spite of the potential cosmetic surgery offers for technological reconstruction of bodies and identities, in application, these technologies usually re-produce traditionally gendered identities - identities which conform to culturally determined standards of beauty/normality", says Farber in an artist's statement. The images and the emotions they arouse make the point well enough, but Farber cannot resist pushing us in the direction of her own thinking, with a snatch of unlikely speech at the beginning of the video. Preceded by scraping sounds, an irritable male voice says: "There's nothing wrong with this instrument. It's the woman. Her body is all wrong."
This small blip is not enough to spoil the powerful overall effect of the work, and the whole exhibition, with its focus on the body, surface and sexuality is one of the more interestingly curated shows (by gallery director Joao Ferreira) to have been seen for some time.
Until October 28.
Check ArtThrob's review of Mark Hipper's body masks at their Durban showing.
João Ferreira Fine Art. 80 Hout Street
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Thembinkosi Goniwe's billboard from 'Returning the Gaze'
A postcard by Brett Murray, forming part of 'Returning the Gaze'
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'Returning the Gaze' at the Cape Town Festival
The 'Returning the Gaze' exhibition organised by Blac in and around Cape Town as part of the recent One City Festival helped us extend our visions and see through the eyes of the artists, as they reflected on the legacies and vestiges of our past/apartheid. Blac's concept in 'Returning the Gaze' called upon black cultural workers "to return the gaze, turn the tables of history by creating a platform and structure for representations of whites by blacks". The exhibition took the form of outdoor billboards and a series of postcards. In its conception, this project seeks "to prise open a unique and unexplored space in the [South African ] cultural landscape,[however], not by crystallising whiteness to its essence but through exploration and unpacking the nature of power and social relations between black and whites from a black perspective". In the event, its participants included the very same whites it sought to return the gaze unto. Do not misunderstand me, I am not advocating the exclusion of whites. Rather, I am being honest about what I do not understand, hence question and search for answers to what is important to me so that I can better understand. Hence, I find it relevant to ask myself, Can whites see black? Or for that matter, can they see whiteness?
Art is situated in history and the individual/ artist's choice of subject matter reflects that situatedness. The politics of racism and sexism in South Africa created a cultural context wherein the white male artist works in an art world that is predisposed to extend him recognition and visibility, locally and internationally. In the South African visual culture images of power and freedom are symbolically personified by white subject in relation to whom all others beings are constructed as unfree "objects". Interesting examples of this are the statues of white male colonial and the late apartheid ochestrators, Cecil Rhodes, Jan Smuts, the list is endless. In sharp contrast to this are the mis/representations of the black people in the South African National Museum.
Most of the works on 'Returning the Gaze' exhibition show some common features as they reflect artist's constant preoccupation with the legacies and vestiges of apartheid. While interrogating the racism and sexism which has shaped the artistic vision of our past dominated by white art practitioners, presenting to us representations that question white supremacy, artists from different backgrounds and various hues articulate the link between that whiteness which claims the black body in representation, only to hold it captive. Questioning such representations, Berni Searle, Cameron Platter, Donavon Ward, Selvin September, Thembinkosi Goniwe, Mustafa Maluka and Zen's work challenges the audience to look and see in a new way.
Searle's work questions and challenges the use of Black bodies as a space where whiteness can be defined as the legitimate agent through which black stories can be articulated while denied the subject position. Berni Searle's work on a billboard adjoining the Boulevard highway confronts us as we go to and come from the city with some of these issues. Through the use of a photograph of herself, lying naked on her back and covered in a layer of white powdered spice, her own body is used as a site on which she maps, critiques and signifies, while imaginatively dismantling the structures of race, gender privilege and relations in representation. Photography as an artistic medium is revolutionised here, freedom of expression is stretched and made more inclusive as the work takes a form and scale normally used for advertisement in our country. The work speaks of a free world where art, race issues, and identity are not static but always changing.
Race or racism has become a big issue in contemporary South Africa. I might as well admit to being fascinated by it, however do not incriminate me of blowing it out of proportion. But we can not run away from the reality that it is alive and kicking. It is precisely because of its existence that we have to constantly re/visit and re/examine it if we are to better understand it so as to be able to see beyond what is given as fact or fiction. Cameron Platter's work on the exhibition reminds me of this. A post card piece with four portraits on which the word race is altered and super-imposed is the word "care". This leaves us with something to eat for breakfast as it challenges us to stretch our minds and reconsider our use of the word race with its loaded historic meanings. In a regretful manner, Platter states "race" is a delicate, yet overplayed issue in our society.
Murray's piece I must learn to speak Xhosa raises complex issues around the politics of language and its function as a career of culture. This piece takes on, in a 'comical manner' the problems which South Africans, white in particular, are faced with and their adamant stance pertaining the learning and respect of other people's languages in the new South Africa. Would it not be amazing and wonderful to sit in a coffee shop with Murray and share a Xhosa joke other than him writing in his English that he must learn to speak Xhosa and maybe also raising consciousness to his fellow whites that they must learn to speak it. It makes one wonder how far has he gone in his efforts to attain the skill since the execution of this historic I must learn to speak Xhosa piece. The effort is appreciated, however how many of them have been saying this? Thus this work can be easily seen at face value and be regarded as sensationalist and just trying to cash in on the name of relevant art.
For the better understanding of this culturally diverse, yet one nation, Maluka seems to be providing leads when he says we have to reckon with the fact that too much indulgence to anything is dangerous. Mustafa it seems suggests that we have to be brave enough to leave a wolf with a lamb and wish for no harm to happen to the lamb. Maluka says that if we consume too much of one culture, the result will be that we end up neglecting the others - something which is not healthy for the well being of any society.
Can the healing of the apartheid wounds be healed with the use of the Band-Aid plasters? Thembinkosi Goniwe's work left me thinking of the meaning of his piece. Goniwe, in his rather strange work, is concerned about what is left behind after the advent of colonialism. Issues of racial classification, power and authority are invoked. Presented to us in a form which reminds us of the reference book/dompass snaps, a portrait of himself and a white friend clearly shows how issues of race and skin colour has preoccupied the minds of our medical practitioners. This is conveyed through the use of the Band-Aid plasters pasted on their faces. The differing visibility of the plaster in their faces says it all as it blends well in the white face while it jumps out on Goniwe's black face, alluding to the fact that the plaster was designed by a colour conscious mind and specifically with a white pigment in mind with the exclusion of black.
Although most of the works in this exhibition are executed in different styles, forms and media, one finds a common theme emerging from them, engaging with social, economic and political realities of its time and the historic imbalances and responses to the current globalisation phenomenon. Where this power is located and how it is used by who for whom seems to be the question Donovan Ward tries to unpack. His work suggests that not everyone is empowered, as a large sector of our black society is still living below the breadline and the lack of proper housing increases everyday. Thus it can be said this work is challenging the "official truth" projected to the outside world by those who wield the power.
Speaking to us in multiple voices, the works in this exhibition made us realise while we contemplate their beauty and strangeness how blessed a nation we are. Only if we can realise the richness of our diverse cultural heritage and learn to appreciate this diversity will we be able to work towards the achievement of healthy social relations in our country.
- Mgcineni Sobopha, is a fine art graduate of the University of Cape Town, currently in his final year of a masters degree. His email address is sbpmgc01@hiddingh.uct.ac.za or
msobopha@hotmail.com
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Francine Scialom Greenblatt
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Francine Scialom Greenblatt at the AVA
by Sue Williamson Francine Scialom Greenblatt's current exhibition at the AVA, 'Style and Seduction' raises questions about the relationship of an artist with his or her public, and what that relationship is. Artists, for the most part, are engaged in an extended internal conversation with themselves, a constant questioning which goes on over a lifetime, as to what it is precisely they wish to say, and how that can be expressed visually. The response of the public to this work is a critical element in this dialogue - if it were not so, why would the artist exhibit at all? This is not to say that the artist should be pandering to popular taste - not at all - but that there should be some coherence in a single body of work, an access to those who come to view it. Greenblatt is a well established artist on the Cape Town scene, exhibiting regularly over the years. This exhibition fills all three of the galleries at the AVA, and represents the artist's work since 1998. In a statement, Greenblatt has this to say: "Since the early 80s, I have been concerned with the psychosexual drama that informs gender dynamics. Through my relationship to the body, I address culture, both visually and through language, in an attempt to understand the mechanisms of the viewing transaction. I am constantly aware that art is made in a continuum of art-history and read in specific locations by a particular audience. Variations of these dynamics remake the meaning of pictures. Beside the male/female nude, I have evolved a lexicon of symbols to act metaphorically. Thus, locks, hands or crossword puzzles may be resituated on round or square formats to create a dialogue between the notions of 'style as content' and 'sign as content'. Mine is a search for images which speak of intimacy as well as grand public gesture in the most persuasive, painterly manner. Irrespective of what is thought, articulated or imagined, paintings should have a presence and the power of accountability, making an art that works on us in secret and in silence."
The problem is, the majority of the images with which Greenblatt presents us are not particularly persuasive. Much of the work seems excessively mannered, executed in a whole range of different styles and formats, and the use of the squares of the crosswords and the padlocks feels arbitrary and a bit tired. Greenblatt was at her best when her raging brushwork matched the passion of her images, and on this show, she demonstrates that she is still up to it, in autoerotic works like Pleasure and Naked. Until October 14.
AVA, 35 Church Street, Cape Town
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Jo Ractliffe
David Goldblatt
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'Collaborations' at Bell-Roberts Contemporary Art
by Paul Edmunds Collaborations don't always work, and although this is not the dominant feeling I took away from the exhibition, it was evident in some of the work. Not that there was any exceptionally bad work on show, just that the alleged collaboration seemed unnecessary in some cases. There is, without doubt, some exceptional work here. The show was not conceived around a collective theme, but all the works were processed and printed by Russell Jones, owner of The Scan Shop in Cape Town. Using state-of-the-art Gicleé digital printing techniques, Jones has helped each of the artists to realise their work in this medium. His introductory essay, on display in the gallery, emphasises the collaborative nature of the production of the digital prints here. Seeing his role as more than just an artisan, he speaks of the reciprocal and creative nature of what he calls a "collaboration". In an age of artistic practice where the mastery of technique is often unfashionable, the expertise of someone like him is clearly indispensable. I don't doubt either party's contribution to any collaborative print process here, but I am rather unsure of the reason for this chosen medium in every case. Of course, contribution to a collaboration is seldom equally shared, but in some cases on show here, Jones' role is reduced to that of artisan by the nature of the work. The works themselves are in turn reduced to mere digital reproductions rather than a real engagement with the medium. The list of participating artists reads like a who's who of contemporary South African artmaking - Terry Kurgan, Berni Searle, Jo Ractliffe and Brett Murray are amongst them. Kurgan's work, Lost and Found, physically dominates the space and is, in my view, one of the show's and Kurgan's finest moments. Old family photographs, perhaps from Kurgan's upbringing, have been printed on large sheets of near-transparent organza. They are strung across the space, each visible through the other - a young girl on a swing, a grandmother watching over a sleeping girl. Somehow, the fabric has enough density to support enough pigment to hold the image together, but only just. Like memories that threaten to drift or fade away, or like photographs which hold those moments for a little longer, the shroud-like prints are as delicate and ephemeral as they are stain-like. In contrast to this is David Goldblatt's The Twenty-six Punishment Cells and Their Lavatory of Section Four Prison for Black Males, Now Abandoned, Hillbrow, Johannesburg, 31 December 1999. A series of similar images on a large horizontal format depict the cruel and squalid above-mentioned cells, generating a grid-like pattern which seems to recede into the wall and project out of it quite alarmingly. I don't question the strength of the image or its chosen format, but somehow I miss the accusatory and seductive quality of a photograph's surface. The colour seems less saturated than it could be, or maybe my eye demands a denser surface. It becomes, unfortunately, a digital reproduction of a photograph when the original would have done a better job. A similar thing happens with David Brown's work, a horrifying tableau entitled Wednesdays (sic) Child 2000. It is really nothing other than a digitally rendered photograph of a three-dimensional object. Where artists together with Jones have embraced the medium as a new graphic language the results are both successful and appropriate. This is true of Sue Williamson's From the Inside: Adeline and Jane Alexander's series which includes Bom Boy with Workers and Traffic. The dense blacks of the shadows and the parched sky grey seems almost insinuated into the texture of the paper on which the work is printed. Arlene Amaler-Raviv and Dale Yudelman's iconic, and by now famous, Joburg Man is successful and different from other works in that the work is an active support for Amaler-Raviv's paintbrush. The huge figure striding, colossus-like, across a busy Joburg street is printed onto canvas. The ink glistens, precious like oil-paint, and Amaler-Raviv expertly turns the man's package into a shopping bag with her brush. Jones extols the virtue of his craft, noting how artists can store and alter images in unprecedented ways. I wouldn't disagree that this is a new and valid printmaking discipline, and I wouldn't argue that it results in works that were not before possible. I wouldn't underestimate both the artist and professional printer's abilities to solve visual and technical problems. The results speak for themselves. I think I might disagree, though, that these works all result in a definitive synthesis of the collaborators' expertise. Where the medium is appropriate and its qualities are integral to the production of a piece, the results are fresh, stimulating and powerful. On the other hand, where these don't come together, it results in works that are essentially copies of an original. Show closes October 14
Brendon Bell-Roberts Fine Art Gallery, 199 Loop Street, Cape Town
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Willem Boshoff
Walter Battiss
Diane Victor
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New acquisitions by the Sanlam Collection
by Sue Williamson As corporate collections go, the Sanlam Art Collection, housed in the company's headquarters in Bellville, is one of the longest standing in the country, initiated in the late 60s, with the stated mission of building "a collection that is representative of the best work done by South African fine artists." Currently on view in the art gallery are the New Acquisitions, 86 works acquired by the Collection in the last two years. Time has moved on since the 60s, and as curator Stefan Hundt notes in the useful handout written to accompany the current exhibition, " ... the South African art scene is seeing a rapid proliferation of installation, video and conceptual art which undermines any certainty of what would constitute an artwork. Many of these works directly refute or are boldly antagonistic towards the principles that art critics, art museums and corporate collections may hold dear. The idea that the sole function of the artwork in a corporate collection is to enhance the environment it is placed it, can no longer be sustained if that corporation is truly committed to supporting the art and artists of the day." Would that curatorial statements be matched by corporate buying decisions. Although there are undoubtedly a number of fine works amongst the art on display, it all feels terribly safe and unchallenging, falling into the conventional categories of framed works on the wall or three-dimensional sculptures of a manageable size. And amongst the standout pieces by artists such as Willem Boshoff, are many which fail to rise above the decorative, like the carved wooden heads of Egon Tania in his Double Portrait, and Leon de Bliquy's hand coloured etching series, Quylibed's Odyssey. Some of the small works on paper do call for careful attention, like the finely drawn and incisive series of etchings by Diane Victor, entitled, tellingly, Disasters of Peace. Kom Vrou en Bring die Kinders shows a naked man, gun in hand, his uncomprehending wife and children mere outlines in the background. Norman Catherine, too, is well represented with a number of satirical etchings. Perhaps the most interesting part of the exhibition resides in the purchases of artists in earlier years. The sure hand of Walter Battiss is shown in a 1976 piece, entitled Fragments, little areas of clear watercolour with body parts superimposed. But overall, it would seem that there are some hard decisions to be made: is the Sanlam Art Collection content to jog along representing the past and the more conventional offerings from the present? Or, taking the long view, would it be better to turf out a lot of the old stuff and allow some more challenging and difficult work to find its way into the Collection? View the show, and see what you think. A timetable of walkabouts conducted by Stefan Hundt will be found in Listings. Until October 15.
Sanlam Art Gallery, 2 Strand Road, Bellville
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Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall
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Marc Chagall in Johannesburg
How do you begin to review a show by an artist whose status in the annals of Western art history is so confirmed? With an artist like Chagall, what can you say about line, shape, tone, colour and form that hasn't already been said? The exhibition of paintings from his 'Mediterranean period' that has been curated for the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg seems to want to not push the point of Chagall's 'Jewishness', a point so often laboured in most of the writing about his work. There is a strong sense of spirituality, but not evangelism. The show has been carefully designed to stress Chagall's humanity, lust for life, and the need to reconcile a sense of self through fantastical images and iconography strongly influenced by Hasidic folklore and many years of exile.
When the exhibition was announced at a lavish reception at Standard Bank headquarters earlier this year, I thought "why Chagall?" If the French wanted to showcase their cultural heritage, why not choose a contemporary (and preferably living) artist whose language is of the moment, like Christian Boltanski? Other than the obvious privilege of being able to view such work in its original form, how is this work relevant to contemporary South Africa?
Marc Chagall, who died in 1985 at the age of 98, is considered to be one of the twentieth century's great masters and sophisticated colourists. Born in Vitebsk in White Russia (now Belarus) his biography is traumatic, fraught with periods of exile in France and the US, eventually returning to France which adopted him in much the same way as they did Picasso. This experience of exile, repatriation, memory and reconciliation (standard fare for many contemporary South African artists) fundamentally informs Chagall's relevance here. Alan Crump goes so far as to draw parallels between his experience and that of George Pemba and Gerard Sekoto. Taken this way, Chagall makes a fascinating point of access into the grand narrative of Western art for many local audiences who can't afford to get their art-fix in museums abroad. The fact that the works are visually appealing also helps!
But the conditions and consequences of hosting such a show, particularly in Johannesburg, are infinitely more interesting than the art itself. It is the first major show of a European master to be held on the African continent with works borrowed from public and private collections across Europe. Needless to say, this is a hugely expensive undertaking. Two separate exhibitions, conceived of as two parts of a whole, opened within a day of each other at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg (paintings and works on paper) and the South African National Gallery in Cape Town (lithographs) respectively.
'The Light of Origins' is not some package-deal show that trawled the international museum circuit for years, ending up here at the end of its run. The show was conceived of and curated specifically for a South African audience, and other than being the first such exhibition, it is also very rare that national museums in Europe lend such treasured work to a private, corporate institution. French museums required much convincing to assure them that a third world country could pull this off.
The kind of infrastructural necessities an exhibition of this sort required major renovations to the Standard Bank gallery (the show arrived in isothermic crates), such that it now stands as the only space in Johannesburg that conforms to international museum standards with regards to both display and conservation. South Africa doesn't have a museum culture to speak of, thanks to years of cultural isolation, so what this really boils down to is a well-conceived and socially responsible PR move by Standard Bank and its many co-sponsors and affiliates, who are closing a gap left wide open by the slow but persistent demise of the JAG. Without corporate money, the show - and future shows like it - would have been impossible.
Taking two years to facilitate, with tangible attempts at sustainability being considered at every turn, the catalogue texts reveal that the team of thinkers and cultural workers involved anticipated virtually every criticism. The stakes are simply too high. An intensive six week-long education programme for school learners of all ages has been devised, running concurrently with lunch hour lectures and walkabouts. The education programme is accompanied by a wonderful task and information booklet, that any visitor would do well to look at. The approach is to encourage an active, informal and highly communicative visual experience, and long terms goals include curatorship and museology training exchanges between France and South Africa.
And while the spin-offs have been strategically calculated (this show opens the door to similar shows of its kind), the real socio-cultural import of this project was best noted by bank chairman DR Conrad Strauss : "It is wrong to assert that a society like ours cannot afford the so-called luxury of engaging with the highest levels of artistic achievement. We cannot afford not to." Those who criticised the Biennale as public money wasted should take note.
With the exchange of cultural assets internationally now a reality, the success of such a show rests as much with the audience as it does with organisers. Attendance levels could radically affect future funding. The confidence that European nations are prepared to instil in South Africa, illustrated through the loan of national treasures, bespeaks something greater than simply good faith and an endorsement of the process of transformation. There's more than money at stake.
Ends November 25 (JHB) and January 14, 2001 (SANG).
Gallery hours: Mon - Fri, 8am - 4.30pm; Sat 9am - 1pm
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Clive van den Berg
Clive van den Berg
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Invested Vestiges: Clive van den Berg's 'Memorials without Facts: Ghosts'
at the Goodman
Above a bed, a skeleton ambles up a string of lights towards heaven... the clouds... the mind's eye...? Another embraces a male figure from the front, knees around hips, in an embrace that is as hungry as it is tender. In the main space, two wall-mounted bed constructions face each other in dialectical opposition: one is clean and unpainted, partnered with a small mound of stones and a beam of light bulbs, each bulb 'insulated' by pads of white felt (Night Light). The other bed, Bed Past, is charred and behind glass, with a watchful eye nestling alongside the headboard. A similar, much larger eye, dripping with lights, hangs in the window and sublimely contemplates the traffic along Jan Smuts Avenue.
Negotiating the void between these beds - two loci of desire and death - is an enormous hand, constructed from bolted beams of raw pine, dowels and strands of light bulbs cascading from each finger-tip to the floor. Creating an intense heat and light that at once attracts and repels, the hand leans backwards, resting on a prop not unlike the beams used to construct roofs of houses. Both shelter and discomfort, the familiar and the grotesque, the metaphoric import of the 'beams' of wood and light speak to the negotiation between the structural (physical) and the ephemeral (psychical) that seems to traverse the show.
'Memorials without Facts: Ghosts' is part of an ongoing project of works under the 'Memorials' banner that has spanned some five years. Those familiar with Van den Berg's earlier works of Durban monuments and land masses, fire drawings and little male figures in the landscape may sense a shift in these new pieces. Quite simply, they look nothing like anything you've seen before, ever. People wandered around the show looking puzzled, trying to make sense of the combinations of oil paint, charcoal, felt, light and stones that seemed to be all the wrong way round - Van den Berg doesn't construct his monumental pieces from bronze or stone, but from pine wood and naked bulbs. And images painted in oils are exquisitely executed 'sketches' - no grandiose historicising here, but rather intimate, desiring snapshots of experience, memory, desire and loss that meld so beautifully with the velvety textures of a series of small dry-point etchings.
But the mixed media confusion is made easier through the simple meditation on Van den Berg's personal symbolism of beds, houses, memorial mounds and male bodies both fragmented and whole. The domestic and familiar become physically and psychically charged zones of trauma, sexuality and unwritten histories. One's reaction is one of quiet awe, not quite sure whether you 'get it' on an academic level, but your gut telling you otherwise. Whatever adjectives you need to apply to the work to cement this fleeting feeling - sublime, contemplative, introspective, sensitive - is paradoxically confounded and confirmed by the very elemental media with which the artist works.
The conflation of the personal and collective experiences of self, memory and identity converge in Don't Fly Too High, a video projection featuring a male figure with bald head and naked torso (Van den Berg) against a sometimes turbulent, then quiet background of moving oceanic forms that could be land, clouds or water. The face of the protagonist is lowered with a tiny animated projection playing off his forehead, as if we are given a window into his mind. What we see is a tiny male figure, tumbling downwards, breaking up and reconstituting himself - the diametric opposite of his ascending skeleton? The work is dangerously euphoric and seductive - like many of the others, about pleasure and pain inverted, "Eros and Thanatos, not as others of each other, but as the conditions of each one's possibility - this discovery of Eros in the battlefield is at once terrifyingly beautiful and redemptive", writes Rosalind Morris in the text accompanying the show.
While his iconography is specific, and the show presents itself as a tightly conceived installation (Van den Berg's sensitivity to the qualities and dynamics of space is exquisite) each work is entirely autonomous and can be - needs to be - contemplated on its own terms. You will find yourself returning more than once.
Until October 28.
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Jane Alexander
Brett Murray The Hero
Stephen Hobbs
William Kentridge
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Urban Opera par excellence
An abandoned car park is a damn fine place to have an art party. Add a posse of awesome pantsula dancers, breakdancers, a host of hip hop maestros and monkipunkers Boo! and you have the stuff that memorable evenings are made of. There could have been more people and less Gauloises Blonde girls - whose purpose I couldn't quite figure out, other than the obvious, but seeing as they're being managed by talented actress, Sylvain Strike, I expected more. But the spirit of the evening was definitely there, aided by transport from Safe Parking (the parking lot at the Market Theatre) on a municipal double-decker bus, accompanied by Stallion Security vehicles, tow trucks and the Maredi Brass Band.
'UnSUNg CITY': how the other half... was one aspect of artist Rodney Place's ongoing project 'ReTreks', which hopes to draw attention to the inner city of Johannesburg not as an abandoned zone, but rather a space that has been invested with a new population and fresh dynamics. Contrary to the assumption that the city is 'dead', Place's projects, including a series of postcards, theatre performances and the newspaper released for Urban Futures 2000, called 'unTITled blURB', seek to "declare up-front, in a high-profile, hybridised multi-media show, that beautiful, modern Johannesburg still stands as the central focus of Gauteng's uneven ghettos. It is still the most important city in South Africa."
Place hosted an art preview the night before the big event, and because none of the artists' names were yet up, it was a question of guess-the-culprit. As the six artists were high profile (Jane Alexander, Stephen Hobbs, William Kentridge, Brett Murray, Robyn Orlin and Place), this wasn't hard work, but an encounter with a red-on-black animation of a lone horse and rider on a horizon accompanied by the most beautiful Ennio Morricone-meets-Phillip Miller soundtrack had me wondering. The looped sequence of lone rider on horizon line, followed by an approaching group of riders of horseback, punctuated with bold phrases like 'The Serb', 'The Israeli', 'The Palestinian', 'The Farmer' and 'The War Veteran' was called 'The Hero' and is Brett Murray's first video.
With typically sardonic economy, Murray has created a visually accessible and aurally seductive work that has as much relevance globally as it does to the inner city xenophobia of Johannesburg. In terms of presentation and taking full advantage of the space, the project scored top marks. The video pieces were projected on panoramic screens that as one wound one's way up each level, the screen divided the space in two. One could view the films from both sides which created an interesting spatial dynamic and stunning effects of shadows snaking across empty concrete floors. Each upward ramp was defined by two spotlights, one red and one blue (safety, security and health, or murder, accidents and mayhem?). Filtering through the open spaces between floors, the lights hit the adjacent building and created the most awesome Mondrian-esque patterning, complete with the silhouettes of party-goers. Standing watching people move above and below you resulted in a sense of self-conscious surveillance that was as aesthetic as it was voyeuristic. Stunning. Popular opinion had Stephen Hobbs' animated 'urban camouflage' stills of buildings-reflected-in-buildings, and Jane Alexander's photomontages emerging as the most successful pieces on the show in terms of relevance and accessibility.
While both amusing and disturbing, Robyn Orlin's filmed performances remain for the most part a mystery, and it was great to see William Kentridge making a whimsical departure from the animated charcoal drawings he has become so famous for. One definitely senses a spirit of play behind the serious content. Finally, Place produced an initially perplexing but truly engaging piece dealing with Johannesburg's fraught mining history. As a title, 'UnSUNg CITY' references both the Johannesburg inner city's apparent demise in the eyes of large-scale investors, as well as 'Sun City', the moniker given to Pretoria Central Prison, making a connection between the real violence and crime so prevalent in the city, and the middle-class shift ever-northwards. Just before one reached the top floor where the performances were scheduled to take place, one encountered a mini-bus taxi (hired from Avis) in which the passengers had become television screens, playing French film-maker Jacques Goldstein's almost-hour long documentary about Johannesburg. This perceptive piece of film-making, and Place's project as a whole, should be a permanent annual feature on the cultural calender, and compulsory viewing for angstige Gautengers.
Absolut sponsored the show with ten bottles of wine.
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Robin Rhode
Robin Rhode
Robin Rhode
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Robin Rhode's 'Living in Public'
by Kathryn Smith Robin Rhode's press release for 'Living in Public (oh... ah, yes�ah, that's available too!)' reads like a rap track - with a nod to the subtleties of art criticism. Rhode has become something of a minor cult icon with his performance drawings and penchant for Black Label beer, always bringing his own (quarts) to openings. This show has a gloss of playfulness that should not be mistaken for a lack of seriousness. The opening featured Ready D on the decks, a posse of friends as Rhode's supporting cast, a bath full of Black Labels, and a fully stocked and functional cigarette vending machine installed in the gallery for the duration of the exhibition. The show provides points of access that are one hundred percent invested in the real world. The real world, according to Rhode, includes his communities, the media, the pursuit of pleasure and social criticism - in short, 'living in public'. His communities comprise his family, both biological and social, in Bosmont, and the 'art world', which Rhode treats much like a bad joke. He engages with it as a series of cunningly veiled one liners - and the joke's always on Art-with-a-capital-A. Having said that, Rhode is totally committed in the pursuit of a working process and method that engages with both personal, intimate experience, and broader-based concerns. What emerges, whether it be a drawn library shelf to which artists must donate actual books, or Rhode performing death-defying stunts on a bicycle mapped out in chalk on a car park, is an exhibition that has as much relevance to his social families as it does to his art communities - and beyond. Ascending the staircase to the main gallery, the first thing one encountered was an advertisement for Absolut Vodka (who didn't sponsor the show), the bottle chained up and subtitled 'Absolut Security'. Turning right, a line of shoes nailed to the wall and floor read like loiterers on a street corner, in an alley way, or perhaps just the regular crowd of freeloaders at a gallery opening. Approaching the 'crowd', a domestic security light above was triggered, throwing oneself unwittingly under scrutiny. Looking up, a line of broken bottle necks stood side by side along a high shelf that spanned the entire right wall of the space. Security, weapon, pipe - the ubiquitous bottle neck signifies all of these things. Its covert status also made it worthy of attention by that other bad style boy, Kendell Geers, in his Title Withheld (Nek), and it's interesting to see it emerge again, deeply inflected with context and lived experience. Rhode chooses to focus on the entire form of the bottle, creating his own ad hoc readings of Absolut ads, drawn in charcoal, beer and spit on board. From simple 'Bottle', to 'Vase', 'Chair', 'Weapon' and 'Sculpture' (a personal favourite - the bottle radiates little cartoon-beams of light), he transforms an object into a signifier for a myriad of social indices that reference economics, ennui and transgression on the one side, and inventiveness, chutzpah and a different sort of transgression on the other. I should imagine that had Rhode hit the New York art scene in the mid-Eighties or so, people would wax lyrical about his 'rawness' and 'freshness' in much the same way they spoke about Jean-Michel Basquiat. No doubt that co-opting the public language and ethos of graffiti is common to both. But Rhode strikes me as having more moxy, lacking the patience to pander to powerful people, and resisting any readings of his work as 'quaintly idiosyncratic' - or something. It's his chutzpah that allows him to draw a bookshelf on a wall, his ambivalence to over-theorising referenced both in his choice of books (a 'monograph' on Basquiat featuring prominently) and their placement. One entitled 'To the Rescue of Art' is busy falling over. Artists are encouraged to donate one art-related book to the real pile that is stacked below. Rhode is building a collection for the Bosmont public library, which suffers a lack of art books of any sort. At the end of the opening, all of Rhode's shoe-referenced 'street gang' appeared to have left the building - in the hands or pockets of vandals or those needing shoes. Delicious irony or poetic justice, this kind of real interaction makes so much sense, provoking a grin - and some real questions as to the real role of art in public, or art infused with social concerns. As Rhode's work illustrates, this kind of awareness need not be navel-gazing in form. On the contrary, he finds security and a sense of self in producing work that derives from difficult places, but that emerges as entertaining and provocative in equal measure. Ends October 7. Robin Rhode is schedule for a residency at the South Africa National Gallery next month.
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Jeremy Wafer
Clive Hardwick
Khwezi Guhle
Seoidin O'Sullivan
Chris Gous
Jan van der Merwe
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Trading Outposts: 'Trapped Reflections' at the African Window and 'Outpost' at the Association of Arts, Pretoria
by Kathryn Smith The African Window Museum has always been something of a curiosity to me, and frankly, I've seldom been enamoured by their installation and lighting skills. Their press liaison abilities aren't much better, but seeing as 'Trapped Reflections' is a Unisa project curated by Koos van der Watt, I got to hear about this one. The line up of artists is interesting, including Walter Oltmann, Minnette Vari, Jan van der Merwe and Gerhard Marx, amongst others. The premise for the show is even more intriguing. Van der Watt has been documenting the structures created by the inhabitants of the Kosi Bay area in northern Kwa-Zulu Natal. These are predominantly reed and wood constructions, used to trap fish. The concerns are primarily survivalist and speak of the immediate needs of a community that are often eclipsed by more globally-focused attention on the environment. Although functional, the structures themselves are aesthetically designed, placed in shallow water and taking various forms. They could easily be read as land art of the 1970's, or closer to home, the increasing focus on the physicality of land and geography that underpins such projects as '!Xoe' and the current KZN exhibition 'Outpost' at the Association of Arts, Pretoria. The potential for this project to engage creatively with the issues that concern the communities of the Kosi Bay area is huge, but the show comes off as rather clumsy and ill-considered in terms of curatorial rigour. The relevance of the structures in terms of the art works and the intention behind this juxtaposition is not clear, and as such, the focus rests on their aesthetic appeal. The exhibition takes place in two adjacent rooms, both of which read very differently. The first space comprises documentation and texts of the lake area and the people who inhabit it, along with work by school children and Unisa students. Some of the more well-known artists' works are also dotted around this space, which makes little sense when one enters the adjacent space. Dark and dramatically lit, the structures themselves have been used to create installation 'zones', with most artists, except Vari, choosing to create a dialogue with the structures either by enclosing their work in them (Koos van der Watt, Chris Gous, Jan van der Merwe), or hanging fish traps from the ceiling and producing a vertical relationship (Gerhard Marx). Why Walter Oltmann's elegant wire 'net' construction is not given a place in this space is a mystery. Instead, it has been lodged between documentary panels and student work in the first space. The art works selected all revolve around such tried and tested concerns as memory, home, identity, history, place and loss. While the works are powerful, I've seen most of them a few too many times recently to get excited. The most refreshing piece was Marx's floor installation, comprising two bright red pitch forks stuck into balls of red yarn, on a red vinyl mat surrounded by text that read: 'At some point my grandmother started forgetting. She forgot recent events, remembering more from her distant past. She didn't forget, she remembered in reverse." 'Outpost', curated by Storm Janse van Rensburg of the NSA Gallery in Durban and artist, lecturer and writer Virginia Mackenny is one of the most original and lyrical shows to have hit Gauteng in a while. It may be, as an ex-Durbanite, that I harbour some nostalgic leanings towards the banana republic (which I do), or that I'm just grateful to reconnect with an often neglected but richly creative art scene. These things aside, the show is a must-see. Confronting Kwa-Zulu Natal's reputation as the last colonial (British) 'outpost' in South Africa, the notion of 'outpost' has been deeply inflected by its implications of borders, ownership, territoriality, invasion and peripheral status. The Kwa-Zulu Natal art scene, while giving rise to many of our national and international 'art stars', still retains this 'peripheral' status. Visiting curators seldom visit Durban, preferring to focus their attention on Johannesburg and Cape Town. According to the illustrated and well-written pamphlet produced with the exhibition (always a treat to take something back with you), Jeremy Wafer's small photographs of crude wooden fence posts in Mexico set the curatorial boundaries for the show. Each image depicts a single post, but the thirty (out of an available fifty) images hung next to each other read as a conceptual and metaphorical boundary-line imposed on a featureless landscape that could be anywhere, fractured and slightly unstable. Langa Magwa's sculptural piece entitled Pioneer 8 5W Made in Taiwan is one of many moments of witty and intelligent perception on the show. A cow-hide 'gramophone' resembling those awful straw cornucopias so popular at hotel breakfast buffets rests on a table covered in a Grey Street-special green plastic table cloth and a pegged animal hide. Inside the gramophone is a speaker that broadcasts the Zulu, Indian and English stations heard around KZN, referencing the province's heady cultural mix in both aural and visual media. From playfully sinister kinetic sculpture (Liza du Plessis) to Greg Streak's austere high modernist sculptural forms, Clive Hardwick's seductive pinhole photographs, video work (Khwezi Guhle and Carol-Ann Gainer) and Tito Zungu jewel-like drawings, the show strikes an elegant balance between familiar visual forms and codes and moments when these codes become conceptually resonant. Seoidin O'Sullivan's series of untitled drawings reference a language system not yet formed and is not dissimilar in style to visual work produced by so-called 'outsider artists'. Sketchy, stippled textures and strips of magnetic tape form a visual patterning that resembles some sort of order, or attempt to create order out of a perceived chaos that is the matrix of the drawings. Punctuated with pieces of text ('you may leave now') in felt-tip pen and ink, the work has a strange material 'poverty' to it that belies its visual and conceptual richness. While I'm not one for gratuitous 'inclusionist' policies, there is a lack of reference to the Indian communities that played a fundamental if relatively silent role in the economic history of the province. (Although Indian culture, Durban-style, does provide the focus for the latest issue of 'KZN News', a newsletter published by the NSA Gallery which is available at the show). This is probably no mere oversight on the part of the curators, but the absence does seem to speak to other more deep-seated problems that are not unique to KZN. But back to reputations. the flipside of the Last Outpost status of KZN is one of radical political violence, but the show doesn't dwell on the surface manifestations of this, preferring to locate, in a variety of diverse works, the residues of colonial desires of ownership and power that have informed subsequent political events and attitudes. That the show is presented in Pretoria at a gallery with a similar orientation to the NSA is interesting, and is made even more interesting in that it followed an exhibition of art from the Eastern Cape - another forgotten but historically and politically problematic zone. But one thing is clear: even though not quite enough attention is being paid to the small contemporary scene in Durban, it is in no danger of losing its reputation as a breeding-ground for truly memorable and important visual art.
'Trapped Reflections' ends October 29.
'Outpost' ends September 22.
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Kathryn Smith
Inside the venue -
Outside the venue
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'Art in the World 2000' : a participant's account
'Art in the World 2000' ('L'Art dans le Monde') is currently on view beneath the ostentatious Pont Alexandre III in Paris, spitting distance from the Champs Elysees. The space itself is rather spectacular ' a labyrinthine complex of stone, barrel-vaulted chambers that is now the temporary home of 100 contemporary works by 50 artists from around the globe. Organised by Beaux Arts magazine, which is something like the ArtNews of Paris, it was curated by editor Fabrice Bousteau through the selection of a number of 'representatives' from critical publications based in countries around the world. They in turn selected two artists from each country, and this year, the second such exhibition of its kind, Stephen Hobbs and I were given the nod by Brenda Atkinson, art spokesperson for the Mail & Guardian ' Beaux Arts' publication of choice in South Africa. The exhibition is framed as a critical exchange between artists, gallerists and critics from around the globe, and artists are chosen accordingly, so it seemed like a fabulous opportunity to witness how the other half does things. The catalogue itself was revealing ' where mostly individual countries are involved, Africa as a continent had simply been split into 'Afrique du Sud' (South Africa) and 'Afrique Noir' (black Africa). NKA was the publication representing 'Afrique Noir', and Salah Hassan made his choice of Capetonian Berni Searle. The mind boggles.
Seeing as Stephen and myself had quite technically-complex works to install, flights and accommodation were provided through an affiliated team comprising Beaux Arts, Paris Musees (who run all the museums in Paris) and the Mairie de Paris (mayor's office or city council of Paris). However, through some communication glitch at the M&G offices, Atkinson only received the invitation two months before the exhibition, and as Beaux Arts requested preferably new work, it was a bit of a mad rush to get things organised in time.
The next few weeks were fraught with miscommunication and language barriers between ourselves and the organisational team in Paris. From one day to the next we were never sure whether we, and our work, would ever get there. The Monday we were scheduled to fly out was spent trying to ascertain whether we were actually on the flight concerned and whether our tickets were ready. Time was such that I had to take my work with me on the plane and pack my clothes for the week in a small satchel. The notoriously fickle weather of Paris made this no mean feat.
First priority was to call Ryan Arenson, the South African artist currently resident at the Cite des Artes, and convince him to have us round for sundowners later that evening. We arrived at the exhibition venue to find that no space had been allocated to us yet and waited around until someone could help us without saying 'ten minutes' every time we asked who to speak to and when would they arrive. Stephen's work, an animated neon sculpture called The Pissing Man, was arriving from Italy that afternoon, so we had to return later to check that it was still in one piece. At the Cite, the first person we encountered was Mark Coetzee, and only then to be told by Ryan that we were just in time for a Gordon Froud opening downstairs!
The four days we were in Paris proceeded in much the same way, loitering in the space waiting to install the work but without much luck. But the clincher came when the city inspectors decided that The Pissing Man constituted a serious safety hazard and it would be impossible to install it in its current state and position. After much frustrated negotiation between the city representative, the curator, and the municipal electricians who wouldn't touch the piece, it was established that there is a law in Paris that prevents the use of neon in public spaces without concealing the transformers behind concrete, as well as the neon tubing being a certain height above the ground and so on. The amount of neon work at the Pompidou alone (that stands in close proximity to viewers) would appear that the enforcement of this law is not as strict as they made out, but they weren't prepared to budge. Stephen's innate ability to troubleshoot kicked in and with Fabrice we tried to come up with any number of compromises. The night before the opening, we left assured that a private electrician would be hired to connect it up. My work, consisting of two large scale prints on mesh and a video projection, designed to fit the specifications they had provided in terms of the proposed installation cubicles, was not yet up. The proposed cubicles never materialised either, and I was given a space with a platform constructed to disguise the effluent pipes leading to and from the river. The width of the area was such that the possible projection ratios would not be even half the size than what I required. The piece was designed as a contained cuboid installation with the prints providing the 'walls' which were to flank the large screen projection. The platform had to be resized to attain anything close to the original plan, but because of the projection distance, the screen ended up being a quarter of the size it should have been.
The morning of the opening we made our way back there to check that all was well, only to stumble into the middle of the VIP preview which we were unaware was happening at all. Stephen's work was still not connected and they hadn't managed to set my projector to the correct format, nor was there any sound. We were avoided by all the staff we saw and astonished at the lavish spread laid out for brunch, including an enormous cow on a spit, roasting in preparation for the evening's event. The opening itself was packed, with Parisian DJ's and VJ's getting the crowd going and fireworks marking the launch of the "Fete de la Seine" it was the best part of the show!
We left Paris the next day, without catalogues and feeling angry and quite powerless to have done anything else to better the situation. The general impression we got from talking to some of the other European artists on the show was that this was not entirely unusual, but still grossly unprofessional. Those who had travelled to install as we had, had experienced the same difficulties. The process would have been simplified had they at least researched the selected works in terms of medium and installation requirements (which were all in writing). We got the distinct impression that the art itself became a backdrop against which a number of artistic, cultural and political agendas were played out, evident in the lists of affiliations between organisations, civil service and engineers. But despite the disappointments in the end results, I came away with the impression that while artists often struggle to get financial and ideological support from government in South Africa, this lack of structure frees up the creative process, resulting in work that is often deeply challenging and prepared to take risks. It's strangely affirming knowing that the bureaucracy that runs alongside bottomless coffers and numerous cultural institutions can become an almost insurmountable obstacle, and realising that the capacities many South African artists have for 'making do' really gives one an edge.
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Jiri Gernicky
Momoyo Torimitsui
Momoyo Torimitsui
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'Art in the World 2000' ' a viewers account
In Paris for the 'The State of Art in Africa and the African Diaspora' conference (see News), taking in the 'L'Art Dans le Monde' exhibition, romantically situated under the Pont Alexandre, was near the top of my extramural activities list. I knew the South African participants were Kathryn Smith and Stephen Hobbs, and was pleasantly surprised as I flew into Paris from Zurich to see that the exhibition was highlighted in the Herald Tribune I was reading on the plane. As a project of the City of Paris, handsome posters for the show were all over town, and banners lined the bridge itself, so it was with a great deal of anticipation that I entered the space.
It soon became clear that with 25 curators in operation, the style, presentation and quality of the work was decidedly mixed, but nonetheless, often fresh looking, and quite engaging. Gijs Muller from the Netherlands showed videos in which, dressed in various outfits including an astronaut's, he offers himself as 'your newest friend' and walks around crowded public spaces with outstretched hand, greeting people. Check out his website at www.uwnieuwstevriend.nl.
My own favourite piece was by American-based Momoyo Torimitsui, nominated by Zing magazine. Remember the crawling baby toys which one wound up to perform? Torimitsui made a lifesize model of a determinedly smiling and suited Japanese business man, on display lying stomach down on a wooden pallett with wheels. Videos showed the model in performance, heaving himself along the sidewalks of New York, elbow by elbow, to the astonishment of passers by. Torimitsui, dressed in white nurse's uniform, would accompany him, once having to stop and pull his pants down to recharge the battery in his back.
Jiri Gernicky of the Czech Republic provided a nice riff on Edvard Munch's Scream and Marcel Duchamp's urinal with his The first mass produced schizophrenic mask.
And the South Africans? Forlornly leaning against a wall, Stephen Hobb's neon piece, derived from a popular Johannesburg graffiti drawing of a pissing man, did not even have a plug attached to its electrical cord clearly a case of insufficient organisational attention to the requirements of the artist. Berni Searle's work, too, a grid of enlarged images of her stained hands, had been hung contrary to her instructions (to suspend the images from the ceiling in the centre of a space) and had been curved out from a wall. In two trips through the space, I failed to locate Kathryn Smith's work, so I stopped for a coffee in one of the best features of the show ' a bar cum reading room where one relaxed on shiny scarlet beanbags, pulling down art magazines dangling in the air on the end of fishing lines and rods to read.
It seems regrettable, but happens so often in the art world, that all the energy and funding that goes into putting together an exhibition like this is sabotaged by a lack of attention to the technical needs and installation requirements of the artists. At the end, there is never enough time or technicians to sort things out.
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