'Disruptive' by Ian Waldeck
by Motlamedi Sehuhula
Ian Waldeck's exhibition, entitled 'Disruptive' was held collaboratively by Artspace and Gallery @ 157, and the exhibition included a live performance by Waldeck on opening night. The space in which the exhibition took place was unusually confined, and didn't allow the viewer to look at the paintings from a traditional distance. This set the tone for the sense of violation that Waldeck offered to a reading of the masters of modernism, including Picasso, Mondrian, da Vinci, Pollock and Courbet. Obviously the 'violation' was performed on reproductions of these works.
Before breaking the works down physically as well as in terms of their representational values, Waldeck had each reproduction framed. Then he cut, crunched and folded the works until they developed three dimensional form. He also challenged the earlier masters by painting portraits of local people over the original western works. Many 'sacred cows' of renaissance and modern art came under Waldeck's fire, including Leonardo's Mona Lisa, Botticelli's Birth of Venus, Duchamp's Nude descending a staircase and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.
The success of the 'damage' Waldeck inflicted varied. In the case of the Baines portfolio, he succeeded in creating an interesting juxtaposition of space. In the case of Les Demoiselles, Waldeck collaged an image of casual Johannesburg workers over the prostitutes, his point being that both are a regular feature in local society, plying a trade specific to their gender identities: the black men are selling their backs and stamina, just as the white women are selling their sex. This points an admonishing finger at the state of our nation, even 10 years down the line.
Johannesburg artist Willem Boshoff delivered the opening address for 'Disruptive'. He explained that Waldeck violated this art because he has always felt oppressed by these European artists looking over his shoulder as he developed his art career. Violating these works liberated him.
Boshoff added that what Waldeck did was not something new to the history of art. He cited the famous erased de Kooning drawing, a work by Robert Rauschenberg, and in true Boshoff style, he drew the talk toward semantic issues. Confronting two Greek words, catharsis and carthaxis, the former meaning to get rid of something and the latter meaning to take in and hold onto something, he explained that the art viewer has two options when viewing an exhibition � either he/she must accept the work as it is, or ignore it.
Waldeck's performance centred on Courbet's painting entitled The Beginning of the World, a famous painting of a woman's genitals. In his performance, dressed in a clown's costume, complete with a red plastic nose, Waldeck balanced the painting on top of a number of huge cardboard boxes, whereupon he suspended himself above it with the aid of a stepladder and rope, and then jumped on top of the painting, thus destroying it. I felt this performance to be largely gratuitous: the paintings worked well by themselves.
Opened: May 15
Closed: June 11
Gallery @ 157
157 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood
Tel: (011) 880 8529
Email: michele@artsource.co.za
Hours: Tue - Sat 10am-4pm
