Archive: Issue No. 46, June 2001
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| ||
| ||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
 |
Cape 19.06.01 'Killing the (M)other' - Gail Neke at Bell-Roberts Contemporary 12.06.01 Judith and Tamar Mason at the Chelsea Gallery 12.06.01 Katherine Bull and Fritha Langerman at the US Art Gallery 05.06.01 Alfredo Jaar curates 'Inferno & Paradiso' at the SANG 05.06.01 'Exchange Values' at the National Gallery 29.05.01 Nigel Mullins at the Hänel KwaZulu-Natal 19.06.01 'Fokofo' at the Durban Art Gallery 12.06.01 Stavros Georgiades and Mark Shoul at the NSA International 22.05.01 'HotCaviarDogs': Samson Mnisi in New York Publications 05.06.01 Taxi-001 Jo Ractliffe and Taxi-002 Samson Mudzunga 29.05.01 The Flat Gallery 1993-1995 by Siemon Allen 29.05.01 Blue Mary: Handwork for Keeping the Home by Gwen van Embden 29.05.01 Art Routes: A Guide to South African Art Collections 29.05.01 KKNK 2001: Visual Art/Visuele Kunste catalogue
|
|
Gail Iris Neke
Gail Iris Neke
|
|
|
 |
'Killing the (M)other' - Gail Neke at Bell-Roberts Contemporary
The best intentions do not necessarily - in fact, perhaps rather seldom - lead to the best art. No one can deny that Gail Neke, in her show 'Killing the Mother' at the Bell-Roberts Contemporary, is addressing a societal problem of the utmost importance to our society. The shockingly high incidence of rape in our country leads to the utter ruin of the lives of countless women, and one would hope that any potential or past rapist who walks around this show would experience feelings of deep shame and swear off abusive behaviour in the future, particularly towards children. If Neke's show has this effect on even one person, then the exhibition will have achieved a significant measure of success in this direction.
For the ordinary gallery goer, however, Neke's approach to her subject is generally so dogmatic and overdetermined as to leave no room at all for any variation of narrative or personal interpretation. Not content with showing a wooden ammunition box of crumpled panties, she adds text to each: "I am, therefore I can be fucked". And this is still not enough. Text printed on a wall label adds Neke's psychoanalytic comments on the objectification of women by "Fathers and society".
A piece entitled Your Myths Are Our Destruction acknowledges Barbara Kruger as source for the title, but throughout the exhibition one is aware of the influence of other artists. Marlaine Tosoni has worked with stains and pubic hairs on baby pants, Kendell Geers has listed crimes in columns on paper, Meret Oppenheim has lined a domestic object with fur. There are oil paintings, some with collaged text, stitched pictures, found objects, ceramics, a row of little metal and paper tablets with text, sausage-like sculptures of fabric, wax and hemp interspersed with blood testing vials - in a postmodern art world, this kind of variety and borrowing would be entirely acceptable if the artist could handle it all with freshness and skill. In this case, one cannot truly say that she does.
Closing: June 30
Bell-Roberts Contemporary, 199 Loop Street, Cape Town
|
|
Judith Mason
Tamar Mason
Tamar Mason
|
|
|
|
Judith and Tamar Mason at the Chelsea Gallery
Judith Mason's iconic images, her mastery of form, colour, tone and paint, and her liberal ideology made her a quintessential South African artist of the 1980s, a favourite among art students of my day. More recent work dealing with the Truth Commission reaffirmed her reputation as a top-notch painter. Her new body of work, titled 'Bottles, Beethoven, Shadows and the Furies', is exhibited alongside her daughter Tamar Mason's 'Ceramics and Engraved Skulls' at the Chelsea Gallery. Invitations for the two shows were very provocative, both displaying rich red tones and a powerful graphic sense. However, the factors which make Judith's work so reproducible are those which let Tamar's down in the flesh.
Judith removes the Furies - three goddesses sent to avenge crime and sin - from their classical context and situates them in our current social climate. In The Furies Profiteer the mythical beasts, with their morphing human bodies, leer pack-like towards the viewer. Their heads are enclosed by chickenwire constructions and they lay claim to a scarlet outline which seems to depict a victim of crime. Mason responds to paint accidents by outlining them and they start resembling beautifully rendered landmasses and clusters of islands. Perhaps they too, in the age of globalisation, are victims of crime, leaving only faint traces.
In the group of works titled A Landscape for Beethoven Mason depicts European landscapes overlayed with symbols and carefully constructed gestural marks which reveal themselves as enlarged versions of Beethoven's musical scores. In paintings II and III, the long horizontal format is home to fjord-like mountains, as delicate as drapery, into which are inlaid ammonites or nautilus shells. The horizontality is offset by the presence of a plumb-bob telling the true vertical. Fine mechanical clockwork components allude to timing and precision; the shells or fossils also refer to time, and the format suggests balance and endurance. The cool register and northern topography as well as the musical theme suggest that Mason is reassessing her European roots - as does the classical reference of the Furies works and the illustrative tradition to which the three Message in a Bottle paintings are indebted.
This northbound gaze forms an interesting contrast to Tamar's work, in which the younger Mason is clearly looking at her immediate urban surroundings as well as a more traditional African heritage. She even adopts traditional African ceramic techniques. Displayed on low pedestals, the pots are often narrow in the hips and wide and square at the shoulders, their top surfaces presented for inspection. I couldn't help but feel the forms didn't sing as they should, and that their walls were not as crisp as they could have been. The symbols explore a range of themes from traditional initiation to motherhood and ilobola. Sometimes the relief-sculpted images are clumsy, such as in Thank God for the ZCC. This work also brings home the multi-referencing which Tamar is happy to employ - motherhood, males and violence, female genital mutilation, domesticity ... Clearly these are all issues affecting South African women, but Tamar's cultural window-shopping leaves one unsure of the depth of her knowledge or where her allegiances lie. Crudely drawn coffins, razorblades, wooden combs and buttons are all iconic but have lost their potency through over-use. More traditional images, such as cicatrisation marks, lose their punch as they grapple to be seen amidst lazily rendered items from a street vendor's cache.
The work is most powerful where it is simplest. Cowrie Shell is a large cattle skull in the centre of which is an exquisitely engraved cowrie, its aperture neatly aligning with the sutures in the skull. The juxtaposition of mortality with cyclical renewal and of vulnerability with aggression, and the allusion to currency, in terms of both cattle and cowries, evoke a range of feelings and thoughts. The simplicity of the object and its incidental finish lend it strength.
The beautiful segues of colour and tone which Judith manages in paint are also present in Tamar's ceramics and skull works. She rubs pigment into engraved lines and allows this to produce a slick aureole around the image. Often she has waxed the ceramic pots and mended cracks with neat copper wire stitches. Sometimes, however, the pots seem too "neat" and beg for some earthiness or relaxed control. While such devices and the use of simple, iconic images makes for good reproduction in both cases, in the flesh Judith's work fares better. Tamar has produced an enormous body of work (nearly 80 pieces), while Judith has been less productive, and it is interesting to see where their chosen themes overlap. The gallery is perhaps a little full, but the rich earthy tones, concise drawing and overall visual experience make it a worthwhile visit.
Opening: Tuesday, June 05 at 6pm
The Chelsea Art Gallery, 51 Waterloo Rd, Chelsea-Wynberg, Cape Town
|
|
Katherine Bull
Fritha Langerman
|
|
|
|
Katherine Bull and Fritha Langerman at the US Art Gallery
by Sue Williamson There seems to be a minor run at the US Art Gallery, a converted church in historic Dorp Street, of exhibitions that respond in some way to the building itself. Alan Alborough did it in September 2000, taking lengths of wet fabric for his process oriented art. Charges from batteries activated nails to deposit rustily elegant geometric "drawings", based on the pointed arched or circular shape of the windows on the fabric pieces over the period of the exhibition. Now Katherine Bull and Fritha Langerman, both ex-Michaelis and printmaking lecturers at Stellenbosch, have together taken over the space to present a joint exhibition which, in the cool restraint of its academic approach and the use of transparent, white or grey elements throughout, could almost have been the work of a single artist. Katherine Bull, reads the press release, "has created a site-specific piece that stems from her investigations of: the physical features of the gallery as a distinctly church structure; the space as a gallery for exhibiting art works and the visitors' responses to the space and its contents as a gallery/church sourced from another gallery institution, the visitors' book." For one of her pieces Bull analysed the gallery visitors' book, noting down the recorded responses in order of popularity. Amusingly tepid indeed were most of the comments, with the guarded "Interessant" and its English version, "Interesting", two of the most popular. Perhaps responding to the clerical aspect of the building, Bull has engraved these responses on the reverse of a gravestone-sized slab of perspex, a kind of RIP for the gallery, maybe, lit at one end by a fluorescent tube. The most engaging of Bull's pieces - and I'm not sure precisely how these fitted into her theme - were circular pieces in three layers constructed over a clock, so that the mechanism of the clock moved the pieces on. Silhouettes cut out of each layer thus kept shifting in relationship to each other. These in turn were connected by cables to rectangles of canvas on the wall, onto which shadows were cast from behind. Fritha Langerman entitles her work Watch, using the word in the sense of surveillance, monitoring, recording and documenting. Entering the first room of her space, one is faced by a modernist grid of small white-framed images of what appear to be architectural details and odd corners, and the shadows they form - digital images taken from a monitor, and worked into by the artist with pastels. In the second space, the space reflected in the monitored images, white hemispherical cast white objects apparently based on smoke sensors/detectors project from the walls, and round the edges of the room. Inscribed on the floor in an edging of white powder which runs round the room at the foot of the walls, are numbers and words which pertain to the architectural features of the room. A line of clear moulded plastic salt cellars bisects the room. The effect is pleasing, but a little ho-hum. The transformation has not gone far enough. Everything seems considered, ordered, but there is nothing to startle or to modify our world view. "The exhibition works within the ambit of installation and is self-reflexive in that meaning is entirely contingent on and embedded in the space itself," says Langerman in an artist's statement. Fair enough. But somehow it all seems a little too contained.
Opening: Wednesday May 23 at 6.30pm
The University of Stellenbosch Art Gallery, Cnr Dorp & Bird Streets, Stellenbosch
|
|
Themba Hadebe
Marcelo Theobald
Inferno & Paradiso
|
|
|
|
Alfredo Jaar curates 'Inferno & Paradiso' at the SANG
by Sue Williamson A sudden darkness. The unlit limbo between heaven and hell. It happens every 18 minutes at 'Inferno & Paradiso', when the slide projectors showing the first set of images round the walls of the Lieberman Room click off in synchronised unison, providing a 30-second break before they all click on again, filling the space with new, lit images. The staging is dramatic. The projector stands fill the central space like mechanised viewers, and, in the new fashion of photographic display, the images are of widely varying sizes and apparently randomly spaced on the walls. World renowned artist/photographer Alfredo Jaar curated this show which is presented as a collaboration between the SANG, the BildMuseet in Umea, Sweden, and Riksutstallningar, the Swedish Travelling Exhibitions Organisation. His curatorial method was this: "I invited 18 photojournalists from around the world to contribute two images to the exhibition (inspired by Dante Alghieri's Divine Comedy). For 'Inferno' I asked them to select the single image that was the most difficult to produce, the one that caused the most pain and anguish. And for 'Paradiso', the most joyful one, the one that has given them the most happiness in the world." There are some extraordinary images. In the 'Inferno' selection, one is by one of two South African photographers included on the show, Themba Hadebe, who came across a young man about to shoot a youth who had robbed him of his cell phone. The youth cowers on his knees on the ground as the businessman takes furious aim. The sound of Hadebe's shutter clicking distracted the man and probably saved the youth's life. In a photograph by Marcelo Theobald, 20 bodies in varying poses are laid out in boxes, surrounded by a horde of people. Taken in 1993 in the city of Rio de Janeiro, the image shows bodies of a poor neighbourhood selected for a dawn exercise in slaughter by the military police. A third image, this one by Swapan Parekh, shows a bride standing expressionless in the street outside a house. She is seven years old. They are the photos of journalists, a distillation of the kinds of images one sees on the International Photographs of the Year shows, the Life school of photography. It is in the images of 'Paradiso' that a certain sameness of the subject matter becomes apparent - perhaps an inevitable result of a curatorial process in which Jaar left the choice of image up to the participants. There are a few too many images of children across the world at play. And unfortunately, Peter Magubane's photograph of Nelson Mandela celebrating his freedom, intensely joyful as it is, has been seen too often to hold any surprises. Nonetheless, this is an absorbing show, a welcome visitor from Sweden, and the tension of the shift between images of terror to happiness is engaging.
Opening: Saturday, April 21 at 11am
South African National Gallery, Government Avenue, Company Gardens, Cape Town
|
|
Shelley Sacks
Shelley Sacks
|
|
|
|
'Exchange Values' at the SANG
by Sue Williamson "I began drying banana skins 25 years ago, not for any specific purpose, but because I found it hard to throw them away. I would stand with a skin in my hand, wondering where it had come from, who had grown it, what the life of this person was like. Each skin still had so much life in it, it seemed a pity to throw it away. So I stretched strings across the wall of my room, where the skins could hang to dry. As they dried, blackening, twisting, stiffening, they began to speak through their silent forms." So Shelley Sacks describes the beginning of a project which would eventually grow into 'Exchange Values', an installation or. as Sacks prefers to call it, a social sculpture, which currently fills one large gallery at the SANG. What you see: a floor carpeted with dried banana skins, more densely laid at the centre, some with little blue labels still attached. Round the walls are minimalist rectangles of skins stitched on to backings and stretched on small frames above galvanised iron boxes, each numbered, with a set of headphones attached. The colour of the skins is a deep, matte, browny black, and the rectangles, like black holes, seem to absorb all the light. As one leans close, the faint fragrance of banana can still be discerned, and the textures and curved shapes of the stitched skins can be fully appreciated. It is the number on each box which is the key to the whole piece. Sacks, once a collaborator with Joseph Beuys and now Head of Art at Oxford Brookes University in England, has a long history in grassroots cultural and political organisations both in England and her home country of South Africa. Her interest lies in exploring the way art can lead to a sustainable and democratic society, and in questioning consumerist practices. In a supermarket one day she noticed a "grower identification number" on a box of Windward Island bananas, and slowly conceived a plan to track the bananas back to their source. On two Saturdays in June 1996, 3 000 bananas were distributed to passers-by to eat and give back the skin - a process which in itself led to street discussions on fair trade and consumer responsibility. Assistants started to cure the skins in salt water and flatten them before stitching them onto the cloths while Sacks left for the Windward Islands, and for a month travelled up and down the volcanic mountains and valleys of the island. Supported by the St Lucia Banana Growers Association, she tracked the growers one by one in order to conduct interviews. It is these interviews one hears when putting on the headphones. The stories are on the whole dispiriting and probably reflect the problems of small farmers worldwide. G 060323, George Delice: "I am 64 years old. Forty years I've been planting bananas. Right now the bananas are nothing. It's only a waste of time - there's no money. I raised all my childen before on a smaller income but now there's no satisfaction. I can't ever pay someone to work with me." M 320637 John Patrick Mathurin: "My father died and left me his bananas. I like to plant my bananas and also to eat them. After work I buy brandy and a pack of cigarettes and I dance. You don't get enough encouragement to work. It's just the salary, but apart from that there really are not any problems." As Sacks points out in the information leaflet available at the side of the room, 'Exchange Values' "is not only about bananas, but of everything we buy, use and produce every day." The strong and meaningful social message of Sacks's work, her plea for us to examine the way we live, does not take away from the aesthetic pleasure of the organic carpet of skins, and the stitched rectangles, as beautiful as any African textile. Already installed in five different venues in England, the piece will travel next to Rotterdam as part of the City of Culture events.
Opening: April 21
South African National Gallery, Government Avenue, Company Gardens, Cape Town
|
|
Nigel Mullins
Nigel Mullins
|
|
|
|
Nigel Mullins at the Hänel
by Paul Edmunds 'Hopeful Monsters' is Nigel Mullins's second show at the Hänel. His first, 'Superhumans', is clearly brought to mind by the two works titled Census which hang back-to-back in the gallery window. These are, presumably, the earliest works here and are stronger than both their predecessors and their immediate successors - the 'Hopeful Monsters' of the show's title. The strength in the Census paintings is again made manifest in the later works on show, particularly two paintings entitled Specimens. Every work, however, demonstrates just how comfortable and confident Mullins is with a paintbrush and palette. Each figure in the grid-like arrangement of the Census compositions is surrounded by a shroud or swathe of paint. One assumes, of course, that each is a figure, but closer inspection reveals less rather than more. Aside from their verticality, the odd limb and a nagging sense that they are human, there is little to be told about these glyphs. They seem to be in a continual process of becoming, imbued with the energy of change and allusion rather than a fixed identity. I wouldn't call this energy "manic", as the press release suggests; it is more restless and all-pervasive. The distorted and deformed nature of the figures is, I imagine, what led Mullins to paint the 'Hopeful Monsters.' This series comprises a group of eccentrically sized canvases spaced unevenly along the west wall of the gallery. The "monsters" are faces that have lost their symmetry, gained unearthly texture and outlandishly distorted features, rendered in a vast range of styles and painting techniques. Manic grins, blurred vision and cut-off compositional devices lend these creatures a kind of menace, but they seldom seem worse than mischievous. The faces are typically set against a uniform background, sometimes in a contrasting colour. The denouement is a huge canvas, a good 20cm deep, with a cluster of faces contained in bubble-like spheres. The physicality of the work is impressive, but the "lite" colouring lets it down. The two paintings entitled Specimens seem to take the restlessness and shifting identity of the Census works as their starting point, and the results are as much Hieronymous Bosch as Kenny Scharff. Brushstrokes, washes and paint accidents configure themselves into heaving matrices of would-be figures and faces on a flat background of red in one case and blue-green in the other. Mullins often loads his brush with several colours simultaneously and draws this across the canvas in broad swathes which speak equally of painting and movement. The eye is continually drawn around the works to see just what this primeval soup is conjuring up. These works, like the 'Hopeful Monsters', seem to allude to experiments, perhaps of a genetic nature, but refuse to declare their results. Whereas the former series seems to stop at the idea of mutants and monsters, these operate as comfortably in a metaphoric space, suggesting a number of interpretations. Also on show is An Aesthetic for Cruelty and Violence, which won Mullins a merit award on the 2000 Absa Atelier competition. Forty-two panels depict scenes of torture, martyrdom and violence. Mullins has said the series was inspired by 15th century German painter Stephan Lochner. The contrast between evil deeds and their exquisite reproduction started Mullins on "an aesthetic journey". While the examination of this sort of paradox is not totally original (think of Dave Southwood's images of spent bullets or Anton Karstel's 'Police Aesthetic' series), Mullins's interpretation is both capable and charming. It is impossible not to be seduced by his mastery of gesture, colour and composition as well as his supple stylistic vocabulary. I was more impressed by the show than I expected to be, perhaps because it was publicised by the 'Hopeful Monster' series, which I suspect is less considered. Or perhaps it is the other way round - perhaps Mullins is best when he follows his hand and there he has ambushed himself with over-considered, simplistic depictions of mutants and monsters. When the subject matter emerges from a clash between accident and intention, when he enjoys paint as much as he thinks about it, the metaphor stretches further and the results are more convincing. Sold works will leave the gallery on May 31 and will be replaced by new work.
Opening: April 01
Hänel Gallery, 84 Shortmarket Street, Cape Town
|
|
Installation view of Fokofo: Umen and Fokofo: Uyephina (Where has he gone?)
Installation view of Fokofo: Uyephina (Where has he gone?) and Fokofo: Wall of Men
Installation view of ethnographic items in glass cabinets
Photos: http://fokofo.s5.com
|
|
|
|
'Fokofo' at the Durban Art Gallery
'Fokofo' is not a user-friendly exhibition. Conceived as a means of exploring the different ways in which we record, present and represent the world, it takes as its arena of scrutiny the "material manifestations" of the Mabaso tribe near Msinga. Part anthropological study (Dieter Reusch), part artistic endeavour (Michael Mathews), the rituals, customs and artefacts of the tribe are displayed in a variety of ways to underscore that the way a thing is exhibited affects the way we read it.
Whether the average viewer walking in cold would "get" this is difficult to know - the few I questioned patently didn't. This is due, ironically, to the way the whole exhibition is displayed. There are the usual glass museum cases full of beadwork, clay, clothing with annotated photographs of various events within the tribe's life juxtaposed with video footage (referencing contemporary installation and therefore deliberately unaccompanied by any helpful commentary) and a whole series of large grids of laminated computer prints depicting blown-up scans of woodcuts of various heads and a "virtual" museum on a CD-ROM available on a nearby PC. The whole effect, instead of being visually rich and engaging, is somewhat predictable and cold and tends to keep the viewer at a distance.
Museum displays have reached such a level of sophistication these days that simply laying things in the bottom of display cases, particularly ones with grubby material at the bottom, with annotated cards all askew, looks like a throwback to museum design of the Fifties. It was unclear whether this was deliberate referencing of a generic tradition of exhibition display or just put together by someone with a poor sense of window dressing.
The most accessible part of the display was the series of monumentalised woodcut heads; these engaged at a distance and then, on closer inspection, dissolved to provide fresh information, overlaid as they were with transparencies of texts and artefacts. Such juxtapositions provided food for thought. Transformation of material leads to new readings so a laminated computer scan of a rubbing of an incised drawing on a clay pot of a machinegun, interspersed with text that read "art as a social activity contributes to the stable and harmonious functioning of the community", encouraged one to question the relationships set up. Placed sideways to scramble easy comprehension the text information is seen as fragmentary, breaking any sense of a completely comprehensible picture. At close range the images become pixelated - a pixelation visually paralleled by the images of beaded objects; the beads, like the pixels, encoding meaning.
It is through such "material manifestations" that the conceptual concerns of the exhibition are effectively visually supported. The CD-Rom (available for R50) represents a museum of immaculate surfaces, a sort of sci-fi space where the viewer can navigate through rooms, clicking on objects to gain information. It replicates many such information stands in sophisticated museums with large budgets the world over, only this time the unsuspecting viewer will occasionally be confronted by the sudden appearance, in a doorway or behind a display case, of the kind of figures found in arcade games where you gain points by being quick on the draw. Viewer - be on your guard.
Closing: June 30
Durban Art Gallery, 2nd Floor, City Hall, Smith Street, Durban
|
|
Marc Shoul
Stavros Georgiades |
|
|
|
Stavros Georgiades and Mark Shoul at the NSA
'Traces', an exhibition by sculptor Stavros Georgiades, is a strange amalgam of styles and approaches combined without any trace of irony. The gallery is filled, sentinel-like, with totemic forms carved from wood and stone. On the wall fragments of stone-relief heads with incised inscriptions on spiritual issues flank a great shamanic wooden cloak with deep purple velvet interior. Classical Greek profiles are set against the swirl of spiralling natural forms - flames, leaves, seeds; elemental and mystic - at least that's the intention. The trouble with working with time-honoured images of the spirit is, however, that they can become dated. Much of Georgiades' exhibition is reminiscent of funereal sculpture from the Seventies - all carved shiny black granite with poetic messages. No doubt sincere, the show is full of images with titles like Bearer of Life, Peace and Harmony, which irritate in their generality.
The best work on the show fluctuates between two greatly differing styles, one a kind of elemental formalism, the other a figurative, narrative post-modernism. The formalist pieces, they of the universal spiritual titles, are simple flat discs of granite, roughly hewn. Here the nature of the stone is most important; quiet and powerful, these pieces speak of an elemental prima materia. The more successful figurative works break loose of the predictable illustrational quality, which undermines many of the works on show. More idiosyncratic than conventional, Solo Journey presents a surreal virgin-like stone form with a veil that conceals nothing but a blank space where a face should be; in Listening to Violence a bare-breasted medieval wooden figurehead with a scroll for a belly inclines slightly while at her feet a mini blunderbuss stands; in Head of Light solid burnished aluminium creates a shaggy mane of hair surrounding a dark space within. These are the works that hold one - with their enigma.
Juxtaposing the Georgiades show is Mark Shoul's exhibition 'Beyond Walmer', which covers the well-trod terrain of scrutinising working-class folk in their own environment. Within the genre, in South African terms, these photographs are not as disturbing as Roger Ballen's work nor as dramatically flashy as Obie Oberholzer's. Instead they hope to engage via their very ordinariness, and while some for that very reason are a little dull, others successfully engage. The irony of a youth, Phillip, from Algoa Park, wearing a T-shirt of film stars kissing while in the background out-of-focus blocks of low-cost housing dominate the landscape is clear. A macho, pistol-packing man at a motorbike rally in Maitland is unaware that he delivers an opposing message when he proclaims his faith in Jesus with a full back tattoo.
This is a world that, despite its cheap furniture, dingy apartments and grubby walls hung with fading pictures, is still full of desires and ideals. An unkempt girl sits at the feet of a pumped-up bodybuilder, a bar hosts the aspirants to beauty in the Miss Legs competition - evident is the dislocation between the dream and the reality, but a certain poignancy remains as ordinary people with ordinary lives continue to aspire beyond the circumstances in which they find themselves.
Opening: Tuesday May 29 at 6pm
NSA Galleries, 166 Bulwer Road, Glenwood, Durban, South Africa, 4001
|
|
Samson Mnisi
Samson Mnisi
Samson Mnisi
Photos courtesy of CrossPathCulture
|
|
|
|
'HotCaviarDogs': Samson Mnisi at the Chashama Theatre, NYC
Exhibition spaces are increasingly transforming into performative spaces. Playing on dramatic lighting, mirrors and a harmonious union of set and art, Samson Mnisi's first solo exhibition in New York City was held in donated space at the Chashama Theatre on 42nd Street in the heart of Times Square. Organised by Mnisi and curated by Cannon Hersey, executive director of CrossPathCulture (CPC), 'HotCaviarDogs' presented three pieces from Mnisi's South African show 'Path=+' along with new pieces created during his CPC residency in New York City. On view from May 7 to 19, the exhibition brought together prints, film and video projection, as well as wall-mounted and free-standing constructions.
Encased in a window display facing out onto 42nd Street, one of the busiest streets in the city, Mnisi showcased a mixed-media construction reminiscent of works made for the 1999 Museum for African Art exhibition 'Liberated Voices: Contemporary Art from South Africa'. Pieces in the 1999 show provided the New York art community with an introduction to Mnisi's complex visual vocabulary. Created from reeds, cloth, pigments, muti and various found objects, Mnisi mined symbols and materials from his own heritage to create works that transcend temporal strife and restriction to reach something and someplace new and dignified.
In 'HotCaviarDogs', Mnisi's window piece and a pair of monoprints in the entry space served as visual cues for the dynamic works housed inside the theatre. Separated into mini-islands of space, Mnisi's earlier allusions to travel and transcendence have been made manifest in a series of 'Primitive Time Machines' and 'Ancestral Traveling Machines'. These vehicles of transport were each situated within a circular base of luminous salt surrounded by a ring of earth. Rising from this base, Mnisi arranged three long sticks into tripod configurations. In the 'Primitive Time Machines' these bamboo sticks were wrapped in papier-mâché coverings and painted rich earth tones. The 'Ancestral Traveling Machines' were more minimal in terms of surface ornamentation with colour trimming added to the branches. Resembling conical housing structures made of mud or hide, and found in many different cultures, these tripod constructions were each lit by intense flood lights. Contrary to the title of these works, there is nothing primitive, or simple about them. Backed by Mnisi's rich investigation of his grandmothers' experiences as inyangas, or traditional healers, his personal evolution from being a leader in Umkhonto weSizwe (armed wing of the African National Congress), supporting himself as a thief, and recreating himself as an artist, Mnisi's works are complex and evade simple description.
Lining the walls of the theatre were a series of constructions that continue Mnisi's mediations between the traditional and the contemporary. For example, a series of wall-mounted works incorporated crosses, triangles, hatch marks and other meaningful marks. Off in one corner of the theatre, Mnisi created a wooden box structure with black and white webs of string extending out to the ground and surrounding walls. Housed within the wooden box installation called Catching Joh'burg played a film by Kefuoe Molapo (King), titled Joh'burg, Joh'burg.
In the opposite corner of the theatre a digital work titled The KenSam was projected onto the wall. This collaboration between Ken Feinstein and Samson Mnisi superimposed Mnisi's graphic symbols over film footage of an ocean. The result was a peaceful blend of imagery that was highly evocative of a spiritual experience.
Exhibitions like 'HotCaviarDogs' provide wonderful fusions between art and experience. Hopefully organisations like CrossPathCulture will continue to showcase talented artists like Mnisi in alternative settings. Moving away from museum spaces allows certain liberties and freedoms and promotes engagement with the art.
In connection with their exhibitions, CrossPathCulture is also hosting a series of art happenings appropriately titled Arty Party. Scheduled for Wednesdays, from 9pm to 1am, these events combine music and art in downtown New York at Lotus, 409 West 14th Street.
Hersey also announced that CrossPathCulture will host 'CrossOver 2', a sequel to their successful production-based art residency programme in Johannesburg, from December 2001 to January 2002. For more information on this and other events in South Africa, email Mnisi at samsonmnisi@hotmail.com.
|
|
The cover of Taxi-001
A page from Taxi-001
A page from Taxi-001
The cover of Taxi-002
A page from Taxi-002
|
|
|
|
Taxi-001 Jo Ractliffe and Taxi-002 Samson Mudzunga
Reviewed by Kathryn Smith
The Taxi series of artists' books now has two titles in its archive, namely Jo Ractliffe and Samson Mudzunga, with a third featuring Jeremy Wafer hot on their heels. Wafer's will be launched in time for his solo exhibition at the Goodman Gallery this month (see listings).
When Wayne Barker's monograph came out, there was some confusion as to how it fitted into the series. Well, it doesn't - not really. Barker's book, aka Taxi 000, was something of a prototype that lent itself to developing into a much-needed series of books to fill the dearth of titles on contemporary art from South Africa.
Cue the selection committee: Carol Brown (Durban Art Gallery director), Philippa Hobbs (MTN Art Institute and artist), Stephen Hobbs (ex-Market Theatre Gallery, Trinity Session and artist), Senzeni Marasela (artist), Zayd Minty (culture worker/curator) and Robert Weinek (Public Eye). The series' primary sponsors are Ifas, ProHelvetia, the MTN Art Institute and the Royal Netherlands Embassy, with David Krut Publishing on board for distribution and the nitty-gritty of getting the book out there. The books are trilingual (English, Dutch and French) in order to make them international market-friendly.
Taxi 001: Jo Ractliffe and Taxi 002: Samson Mudzunga were launched within a few weeks of each other, which lent an air of genuine productivity to the project. These two titles were both designed by Roelof van Wyk and edited by Brenda Atkinson (who was also responsible for the text in Ractliffe's book), but possess vastly different style conceits that, while they are appropriate for the content of each book, result in two rather different products.
There is no reason to state the obvious here (wich is that it's great so many resourceful people are investing so much in the series, which is much needed, and that it is destined to go from strength to strength as it grows). These books are very readable (I got through them both in one sitting), and pitched perfectly - accessible to senior scholars, tertiary students, culture workers and academics.
Ractliffe's book presents itself as a very glossy document with full colour plates and black and white imagery, faithfully reproducing her body of photographic work. Where her installations are concerned, as in her Vita winning video piece, a still is isolated on a black page, mimicking the presentation of the work. Guess Who Loves You, the series of colour photographs of chewed dog's toys shot against a lightbox, are reproduced full page, as a stark but colourful counterpoint among pages of monochromatic strips of images, soundbytes from the artist (her "voice" appears in grey) and a page of seemingly arbitrary word associations.
It's the inclusion of these, alongside large empty spaces around images, and at one point, a symbolic "hole" in the text where Atkinson is speaking about Eros, Thanatos and images that are "about icon rather than medium", that reveals the strategy behind the document.
The text is not simply commentary but works hand in hand to reveal how Ractliffe's images function - as elusive, transient, mutable things that don't actually function as images (that is, as straightforward representations). As Atkinson states, "if you're looking for familiar languages and legible territories, it's not going to let you in". And with reference to the early series Nadir, but by association appropriate to much of Ractliffe's production: "the simultaneous intent to convince and deceive occurs both by default and by strategy".
Psychoanalytic rhetoric and references to film and photographic theory are prolific in the text, and while Atkinson's style makes the text enjoyable without losing complexity, I personally appreciate Ractliffe's images for their sense of at times maddening "non-delivery". Where this is revealed by virtue of the design conceits of the book, I am a bit ambivalent about whether the book as whole suffers from "over-delivery" resulting from a combination of all of the above elements.
Having said that, it is a very comprehensive document that approaches image and language with equal weight. Read alongside the thorough educational supplement, its only lack is that interminable Freudian kind.
Samson Mudzunga's book sits on the other side of the fence. A matt, slightly textured cover featuring a startling portrait of the artist, and all images in black and white, is good to hold, but the lack of colour for a very colourful character seems odd next to Ractliffe's quite lavish production (by South African standards - we�re not talking Phaidon here).
Mudzunga is infamous for his liminal approach to production. While he is based in the Northern Province, he sees Johannesburg as the urban centre he needs to market himself, network and sell his work. Needless to say, this approach, coupled with his flaunting of many traditional Venda beliefs in his "performances", has rendered him unpopular with power structures in the province.
This has been carefully worked into the book, which features well-researched and honest texts by Giyani-based art educator Kathy Coates (who has worked with Mudzunga for some years) and Stephen Hobbs, whose relationship with the artist began when Hobbs was director of the Market Theatre Galleries. The book opens from either end, with "Venda" on one side and "Johannesburg" on the other. Both texts present Mudzunga's story in a "site-specific" manner. Juxtaposed, the complexities of his practice, which are actually too large for one publication, are revealed.
Care has been taken to reproduce original documentation regarding Mudzunga's self-promoted performances, press releases and other seminal moments, like his dismissal from his job as a driver due to his spending too much energy on his "other job" - art. A bit of a sensationalist and spin doctor, Mudzunga's voice is however absent from the text. The circumstances surrounding the ongoing controversies that have led to his incarceration in the past are never really clear, but that is almost incidental. His account of these events, as well as personal descriptions of his work (carved coffin drums), could very easily be worked into these texts as a counterpoint or deliberate red herring. Put simply, it seems strange to produce an "artist's book" without a statement from the artist that stands alone as such (ie not as a reproduced press release), especially when the history of writing about "art from Africa" has been so criticised for being based on second-hand commentary, no matter how well-informed.
Also on this point, Mudzunga's autobiography, which is referenced by Coates as a one-page compilation, doesn't seem to appear in the book, which, after reading the context in which she speaks about it, is like dangling a carrot.
With reference to the criticism levelled at both publications, I have no doubt that the things I noticed were debated ad nauseam by the committee, and I appreciate any response they offer. Given that the series proclaims itself as "artists' books" and not monographs, I enjoy the intention of creating each one as a signature of the artist concerned, without losing an overall series identity.
|
|
Cover of The Flat Gallery
Ledelle Moe
'A Minor Retrospective', (detail) 1993
Allen & Barry at the FLAT during the opening of the 'Festival of Laughter', 1994
|
|
|
|
The Flat Gallery 1993-1995: A documentation and critical examination of an informal art organisation in Durban
By Siemon D Allen, with a foreword by Jay Horsburgh 'Published' March 1999 by FLAT International ISBN 0-7960-0718-7 320 pages, $200 from FLAT International, email: FlatInternational@hotmail.com Reviewed by Sue Williamson If the title of this most remarkable volume sounds something like a dissertation, this is what it was. However, this engaging documentation of four young artists who turned their living space into an always-open gallery reads more like an entertaining novel than a dissertation, and gives a unique portrait of a most important alternative art venture in the coastal resort of Durban, South Africa's third city, in a time of transition. Siemon Allen has had a limited number of copies of the large format The Flat Gallery - produced on an Apple G3 and printed on an Epson Stylus Photo 1270 - bound in hard cover and distributed, and I feel privileged that one came my way. More will be made in the same method as the need arises - thus the author's inverted commas around the word "published". Other notes in the front tell us there is no copyright, and any of the texts and images - of which there are a satisfying number - in the book may be freely copied or translated. But let the fly leaf give a fuller explanation: "The FLAT Gallery, housed in an apartment on Mansfield Road in Durban, was founded in October of 1993 by the apartment occupants: Ledelle Moe, Niel Jonker, Thomas Barry and myself (Siemon Allen). Born out of a growing dissatisfaction with the limitations of the existing art scene in Durban and the need to take a more proactive approach in creating exhibition opportunities, the FLAT became a site for exhibitions, performances, multi-media 'events' as well as a place for broad range of creative exchanges ..." Over the next 16 months, the four young artists (although Moe left for Washington in 1994) were to mount 32 exhibition events in their "lounge", cramming all their possessions into the bedrooms or even moving out altogether in order to make space. Nor was the work necessarily confined to the FLAT - the group on occasion appropriated the street below as additional space. In October 1993, Moe left two steel and concrete sheep on the pavement, recalling years afterwards, "I remember sitting on the balcony (for a number of days) and watching people passing by the sculptures on the pavement. And someone at 4am in the morning would trip over the leg and then curse and kick it. The public interaction with those pieces was very interesting." Much of the book is written in dialogue, as Allen conducts interviews in later years, and he follows Moe's comment with this reflection: "With the shift in government, the fact that you could just do that - leave the artwork on the pavement - we felt that there was a sense of lawlessness in the country. The police would not come and say, "What the hell in this in the street? Take it away!" The following month, in November 1993, Johannesburg artist Kendell Geers was to have his first exhibition at the Durban Technikon Art Gallery - an installation of suspended bricks. In a subversive strategy, the FLAT artists photocopied works by Geers from various catalogues, mounted the black and white copies on masonite squares, and presented them on the walls of the FLAT. Posters and invitations were sent out to the faux retrospective of Geers' work. Less than three hours before the "opening" the FLAT crew painted the floor with black enamel paint to smarten it up. The paint did not dry in time. Crowds came and stuck to the floor. The squelching noises and footprints seemed part of the whole, and many liked this exhibition better than the real one. Interestingly, Geers, with his strategy of appropriation, never denied that he had staged the FLAT Gallery show, leaving most with the impression he had in fact been responsible for both shows. The guiding principle of the FLAT was that "anyone can do anything in this space". While the freedom of this tenet led to a number of innovative experiments, providing space for young emerging and marginalised artists who would not otherwise have found a place to show, inevitably some presentations were less successful than others. Allen does not gloss over the shortcomings of the FLAT. Working on his dissertation, in 1998 he conducts an interview with one of the gallery's critics. Allen: In one of the recordings taken at this event (The First International Theatre of Communication, May 1994) you expressed some criticism about the event (and/or the FLAT). ["Well, once again I have to tell you that I think it's really fucking pathetic."] Could you articulate why you felt this way? [Durban artist] Carol Gainer: The reason why I felt as strongly as I did at the time ie "fucking pathetic" and "masturbation" was because I felt as if the FLAT was becoming a "boys' own club". I seem to remember feeling that the lack of boundaries during this time was not a problem for me but ... the exhibitions/performances did start to move into something else which I did not really think of as art. The element of debauchery seemed to shift the pieces into more of a "jolling" catgeory ... if one did not hang out continuously at the FLAT drinking etc then one did start to feel alienated ... the intensity on a very REAL level which I had previously experienced was not there for me." The intensity which represented the best aspects of the FLAT are well described in Allen's book, which also includes opening chapters discussing the art scene in South Africa at the time, with special attention to other alternative spaces and ventures. The book ends with the demise of the FLAT. By January 1995, the occupants had been given notice to leave, and in the very last week, an accidental fire burned all the remaining possessions of last occupant Jay Hosburgh except for his passport. Driving by in a car, Allen and Barry were just in time to see firemen putting out the last of the flames. And so the FLAT came to an end. In the period of its existence, most of the significant artists working in Durban and many visitors had crossed its stage. How fortunate that Allen has made this book. It is a lively, thoroughly readable, highly informative and most significant contribution to the writing on art and artists in South Africa. The high price is necessitated by the fact that the book is virtually handmade, but a CD is in production, and a website is planned. Correspondence can be directed to FlatInternational@hotmail.com.
|
|
Gwen van Embden
|
|
|
|
Blue Mary: Handwork for Keeping the Home
By Gwen van Embden Published by the artist in a first edition of 100 Photography by Stephen Inggs ISBN 0-620-26616-3 R695 from Clarkes Bookshop Reviewed by Sue Williamson Like The Flat Gallery, Blue Mary: Handwork for Keeping the Home was produced as an academic requirement towards the attainment of a masters degree, but this is perhaps the only similarity between the two projects. Where Siemon Allen documented the public life of what would ordinarily have been a private living space, Gwen van Embden delved into her family's and particularly her mother's past. In a very personal journey which sought to untangle old familial puzzles and relationships, Van Embden collected and drew on photographs and objects, both humble and historical, as clues along the way. As part of this process of self-discovery and enlightenment, Van Embden investigates the meaning of work made by women, and uses many of the images unearthed in different ways: in what must have been a very painful exercise, the heart shape first stitched onto a pre-school sampler is now stitched into her own breast. Old photographs are transferred in blue glaze to a dinner service which is now in use in her family. In a fold-out pocket in the front of the volume is an interview in typescript which Van Embden conducts with herself. On the opposing fold-out flap, the artist details the methodology of her project, defining collection as "the selection, gathering and keeping of objects of subjective value. These are items specifically selected to construct visual meanings that function in the family as a set of values which 'the keeper' deems worthy of preservation". This slightly ominous statement is our entry into the book. There is further background material on the back flap. Without this, one would be somewhat lost, as all of the rest of the book consists of photographs, sometimes with handwritten or pasted text captions but often unlabelled, of: family photographs, small natural objects like shells and flowers, pages from books and old catalogues, assemblages of objects, souvenirs, the dinner service, shards, all expertly photographed by Stephen Inggs. The personal aspect of this book and the fact that it was produced as an artwork make it a little difficult to critique as a book on sale to the general public at Clarkes. As a piece of art and act of familial archeology and documentation, Van Embden's work is exceptional, and her examiners pronounced themselves sufficiently impressed to recommend the work for distinction. However, a member of the public, with only the opening essays as framework, might find the dense selection of photographed objects in the thick volume sometimes arbitrary and a little overwhelming. A more rigorous editing might have imposed a necessary tension. And then too, the random form and earnest, un-ironic tone of the captions and pasted entries might seem to be too much the not entirely welcome confessional of a stranger.
|
|
Art Routes: A Guide to South African Art Collections
Isaac Nkosinathi Khanyile
|
|
|
|
Art Routes: A Guide to South African Art Collections
Edited by Rayda Becker and Rochelle Keene Endorsed by the SA Museums Association Publisher: Witwatersrand University Press 2000 ISBN 1-86814-349-X 248 pages; R145 Reviewed by Sue Williamson A must for the cultural tourist, this handy-sized field guide, divided by provinces, gives an introduction to a complex subject. With a network of almost 400 museums of one kind or another across the country, the editors' criteria for inclusion were that the institution had to be open to the public and have a permanent collection. Each was asked to provide information on its staff and collection, to name the most important artists in the collection, and to select one or more of its most seminal pieces to highlight and write about. Obviously, in a small volume like this, only a limited number can receive extended coverage, so at the end of each provincial section some of the smaller museums are simply listed with the address and opening times. In the introductory essay, editors Rayda Becker and Rochelle Keene discuss their choice of museums, and also the difficulties of categorising the kind of beautifully made traditional object that in earlier times would not have been considered "art" but is now finding its way into collections. "Although this is a relatively recent change in collecting practices, it is an important one, as it reflects not only a shift in the definition of art, but has a political dimension in South Africa. These objects deal directly with issues of power, ownership and representation ... if this book had been compiled even 20 years ago, the listings would have been very different." With these remarks in mind, it is interesting to see which works the institutions consider their most important. Not surprisingly, most try to give a cross section of their holdings, ranging from the traditional through to the contemporary. Thus, the Durban Art Gallery selects Wyndham Lewis's Portrait of TS Eliot (1938), a coloured plastic wire woven basket by Simon Mavundla (1999) and Jeremy Wafer's wall sculpture, Red Square (1996), in earth pigment over polyester resin. Art Routes: A Guide to South African Art Collections is unique and fills a real need, and thus it is a little disappointing to report that the colour reproductions are not always up to standard, as in the Helen Sebidi pastel from the South African National Gallery and the Willie Bester piece, Land Act, from the Tatham in Pietermaritzburg. Nonetheless, we are indebted to the editors for their hard work in putting the book together, and it is to be hoped that it will be found not only in every bookshop but also at the tourist information centres in each city, ready to catch the inquiring eye of the visitor.
|
|
KKNK 2001: Visual Art/Visuele Kunste
|
|
|
|
KKNK 2001: Visual Art/Visuele Kunste
Catalogue of the exhibitions at the Klein Karoo Kunstefees, Oudtshoorn Editor: Clive van den Berg Design: Fever° Sponsored by Sasol 63 pages; R30 Reviewed by Sue Williamson Top book designer Jenny Young, flipping through this catalogue, commented how very brave the designers (Fever°) had been to leave a narrow white border on many pages of the catalogue, framing the reversed out blocks of text and the images like a photographic border. South African printers are not renowned for their accurate final trims, and such design refinements have often led to grief in the past. Credit for the reproduction and printing here go to Ultra Litho, and also to Sasol for footing the bill. This is certainly the best designed catalogue to have crossed my desk for some time, and the pleasure of looking at it adds considerably to my enjoyment of the contents - a complete guide to the exhibitions and artists' initiatives of the most recent Oudtshoorn festival. There are essays by visual arts director Clive van den Berg, curators Kathryn Smith ('Body: Rest and Motion') and Marcus Neustetter ('switch on/off') and artists' statements to accompany most of the works, which were overall of an extremely high standard. A notable achievement all round.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| ||||||||||||||
