Incorrigible Corrigall

I had forgotten that Brett Murray used to have a sense of humour. Perhaps he never lost it; maybe we did. Standing in front of Murray’s 2002 work I must Learn to speak Xhosa brings to mind his sharp brand of satire, the laughter his approach once provoked. It’s a painted metal sculpture depicting an old (white) man kneeling in front of a bed, praying. The title of the work appears in a speech bubble below.

The work marks a time when Murray was still mocking the old guard and, in the context of the Art of Banking: Celebrating through Collections, it is used to visually map the mood of the 1990s, a time when white people presumably became acutely aware of the errors of their position, or at least felt their vulnerability in the face of an about-turn in the political and social status quo. Norman Catherine’s Endangered Species, a 2001 work consisting of a wooden cabinet populated by hybrid figures and objects, such as a bottle of “stay alive pills”, is also co-opted in service of articulating this sentiment.

It’s a curious process; using works from one time frame to illustrate another period. But largely this is how this exhibition has been constructed by Barbara Freemantle of the Standard Bank Gallery. The show isn’t simply an exercise in showing off works from this institution’s substantial art collection but, in celebration of its 150th anniversary, the works have been used to gloss over the country’s history from the 1860s. Given this fairly unexciting objective, I expected a dry, if not dull exhibition. This jumbling of time frames has certainly allowed Freemantle to animate this history in a different way; the contemporary works that illustrate this period simultaneously undermine or question some of the events that have been selected to define it. This engenders a sort of parallel story or powerful subtext.

But this modus operandi presents problems, too. For example, it allows a kind of hindsight that was not available at the time of these events. Murray and Catherine’s works were made almost a decade after the time frame that they are meant to capture, so can they really relate to prevailing sentiments in the 1990s? This kind of fast-forwarding to future conditions or mindsets makes the artworks operate as a screen that projects a more politically correct reality, though many are juxtaposed with works from the actual era they are meant to depict. Murray and Catherine’s works are shown near Penny Siopis’s diptych Always Something New out of Africa, made in 1990. Contrasting with their works, the latter suggests it may have been a time when white artists identified with the political struggle. In the late 1990s, when the so-called Grey Areas debate dominated local discourse on art, Siopis was criticised for her level of identification with black subjects and/or representation thereof.

Always Something New out of Africa presents a naked black woman holding a sheet to her body; she appears like an artists’ model. Behind her are densely packed drawings of violent battles – presumably the country’s history. The white sheet, which can also function as an artists’ canvas, opens space between the present and the past and mediates it in different ways. The painting also deals with violence to the female body and other gendered debates, but, in the context of this exhibition, it articulates art’s relationship to history. Unwittingly it also brings to mind how art can be used as a tool of misdirection – this can have both positive and negative ramifications.

The chronological narrative of this exhibition does pivot on the art, rather than history. An Irma Stern still life, Gardenias (1940), for example, doesn’t link up with any important event, other than itself and the fact that it is part of the Standard Bank collection. It’s not an insignificant collection; it consists of works by the who’s who of bankable artists from Gerard Sekoto to Sam Nhlengethwa, William Kentridge, David Goldblatt, Wim Botha and Marcus Neustetter. The list goes on and on. We have seen the French masters (in the last exhibition), now it’s time to roll out local 'masters'.

Artworks are historical documents of a different kind; they are not factual and are more vulnerable to new readings because of their ambiguity. Natasha Christopher’s Limn (2007) is used to depict the establishment of Joburg. It is the composition of a confluence of natural and unnatural elements at the centre of the photograph that facilitates this reading, though it is such an arbitrary moment and setting. In a way this work is about attaching significance to the ordinary, though it is a formal celebration of things that lack monumentality.

The juxtaposition between painting and photography vis-à-vis their varying approaches to depicting the landscape dominate this show. It serves to contrast how historical idealistic notions of the land contrast with the dystopian view embraced now by the likes of Guy Tillim and Goldblatt. With its luscious pink and green brush strokes, Edward Wolfe’s Struben’s Farm (1956) is in stark contrast to the dry barren landscape in Tillim’s Stanley’s Stoep (2003).

Township scenes are another recurring motif. David Mogano’s Alexandra Fire (1998), Durant Sihlali’s Kliptown Floods (1977) and Sam Nhlengethwa’s remarkable work, Baragwanath Bridge (2006) all present views of these settings from street level and are offered as defining signatures of the 1940s and the 1950s. Sihlali’s acrylic work is more satisfying than his watercolours; it’s a treat to be able to compare it to his 1991 rendition of Freedom Square, Kliptown, and view the shifting politics underlying the difference in how they have been rendered. The 1970s work was all about recording the weight of the dire living conditions.

Nhlengethwa’s photographic composite of the Sowetan landmark is a constructed truth, displaying the iconic aspects of the place in such a way that it seems whole, capturing the larger-than- life details of the place, yet, at the same time, speaking of fragmentation. This work is used to evoke the 1940s, though Nhlengethwa fast-forwards us to the recent present. In this way, Soweto’s history is overwritten, evoking a sense of denial and triumph – history has been transcended.

This overlayering of time produces interesting ironies, as with Diane Victor’s Monument II, which shows a destroyed monument, in the time frame when the Voortrekker monument was built. It’s as if the regime it memorialises, was instilled with the seed of its decay from the outset.

The pointed recontextualisations of artworks in this exhibition can be quite simplistic, glib and incongruent, like two works by the Essop brothers that are meant to tie in with the Arab Spring.

Johannes Phokela’s The Bean Feast (undated) is detached from its post-colonial thrust, coming to signify the rise of conspicuous consumerism thought to have been the driver behind the recent economic crisis in Europe and the US. This new twist works; this traditional painted tableaux depicting a group of people caught up in an orgy of food and drink shows how Western greed has caused its own implosion, but would Phokela be thrilled with this new reading?

Ultimately, this exhibition inserts some great artworks back into our consciousness, and into new sets of discussions that the artists could not have predicted. - published in The Sunday Independent, October 28, 2012. Image is Goldblatt's Boorgat is Die Antwoord.

It was only going to be a matter of time before Stephen Hobbs would build another model of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International. The tower was conceived around 1919 by the Russian artist and architect, and it is easy to see why Hobbs is fixated with its design. It was a grand scheme in every way; not only did Tatlin set out to create a building that would rival the Eiffel Tower, but it was conceived as an information and propaganda hub for the communist state – it was architecture about and in the service of an ideology. Tatlin had even planned for a projector to be located in its upper reaches so that messages could be cast on passing clouds.

The scheme itself turned out to be pie in the sky. Small models of the building were completed, but it was never built. Interestingly, it is this fact that titillates Hobbs, beyond its symbolism as a utopian project for social change. It feeds his fascination for architecture that has never been realised – can never be realised. It’s an unusual preoccupation, if not one that seems in contradiction with the objective of this discipline. There is a kind of poeticism to unrealised potential that has captured his interest, one no doubt fuelled by his own unrealised imaginings, or the limits of reality, particularly for an artist interested in urban space.
Tatlin’s unrealised building has become as iconic, certainly in artistic and architectural circles, as the Eiffel, to which it bears a strange resemblance; it’s like a twisted, contorted version of it. Many have argued that Anish Kapoor’s Orbit sculpture for the Olympic Park in London bears some resemblance to Tatlin’s tower.
Over the years Hobbs has been replicating this constructivist design in models and paintings – as in The End of Cities, shown at the Blank Gallery in 2009 – but his latest rendition of Tatlin’s model, now on show at an exhibition dubbed Dazzle Plans, presents another step in his long-standing relationship with this famously unconceived building.

Hobbs suggests that it is his cleanest, sharpest model yet. This is facilitated by the 3D-style printing that Brendan Copestake offers at Parts and Labour, the design studio-cum-project gallery space where Dazzle Plans is being staged. It’s a small exhibition, presenting a mixture of models using the 3D printing technology, previous works that bear relationship to them, and Hobbs’s own tentative sketches and collages.
Some of these ideas will manifest in a solo exhibition planned for Stellenbosch University early next year, but others, like Tatlin’s tower, will for ever remain unrealised. It’s not simply a way of avoiding failure or disappointment, but of preserving an inchoate idea at its height of potential.

Hobbs’s new model of the Tatlin tower may be the slickest he has made, but this is not what is interesting about it. It’s the scale. It is tiny – perhaps 15cm in height. In this way, Hobbs moves it even further from being or appearing as an actual building, or even an architect’s model. It’s like a plaything, maybe even a tourist souvenir like those tiny Eiffel Towers hanging from key chains that are for sale along the Champs élysées. In other words, it could be read as a response to the ubiquity, fixation with this iconic structure that never got a chance to become a landmark building.

In a way it didn’t need to become a landmark. It functions as one nonetheless, albeit that it is|detached from a physical setting. It’s a kind of imaginary nomadic building that keeps popping up in unexpected places, as at Parts and Labour, at Arts on Main. Hobbs’s obsession with reproducing the model, a model of a model, speaks of a drive to reach an unattainable ideal but also one to unravel its latent potential. What would the perfect model of Tatlin’s tower be, given it has not existed, but also what could it become?

The second striking aspect of this model is the large stylised cloud suspended above it. It is obviously in reference to the plan to project and disseminate messages to the masses from inside the tower. Hobbs has also covered the cloud in a “razzle dazzle” pattern, a monochromatic pattern conceived for warships as a mode of camouflage; its obscured hard edges thus thwarting efforts to direct an attack. Here the razzle dazzle pattern allows him to work at erasing the boundaries of the hard material from which the cloud is made. It’s a tool of invisibility. In a way Hobbs has reversed the relationship/contrast between the tower and the cloud; the cloud is indirectly treated as if it has form, while the diminutive tower is less tangible but, ultimately, his intention is to reveal the cloud as another unrealised part of the tower, as an architectural extension that purely embodies ephemerality.

Bronwyn Lace is similarly fixated with the ephemeral. Her concern is perhaps the grandest of all; to grasp the mysteries of life/death. Religion and science are usually relied upon to explain seemingly inexplicable natural forces, but Lace doesn’t seem interested in teasing out the politics of these opposing epistemologies, though she does indirectly make reference to them.
Her aim is to give visual expression to phenomena we cannot perceive with the naked eye. A series of blind embossings of dead insects evokes historical collections of butterflies pinned behind glass casings that served to catalogue nature, though ironically in doing so the insect had to die. But in these blank traces of small bodies left on the paper we can perceive not only the absence of life – the absence of a body – but also the trace it leaves. This engenders the notion that somehow Lace has, through this invisible imprint, captured the essence of life - this unseen quantity.

God’s Finger, a circular column of fish-gut lines suspended from a window to the floor, similarly gives expression to an invisible force. It is not so much the particles in the light that are evoked through the coloured glass pieces suspended along the lines – as the title implies, it is the life force itself, the act of creation, an unseen presence, deity perhaps, that is made visible.
It helps that Lace’s medium, the translucent wire, is invisible. Of course, the colourful glass shards also summon an atomized stained glass window common to church design, where God’s presence is perceived through coloured light reflecting into the building.
There is something quite grand and awe-inspiring about this installation. This works for the work, and against it; it reinscribes the mystery. Lace is simply (re) visualising the enigmatic without disturbing its enigma. As a result, the installation feels superficial, a mere aestheticisation of the unknown. It can’t offer us any concrete evidence, knowledge, because their isn’t anything substantial that is available. - published November 18, 2012, The Sunday Independent.
Dazzle Plans is showing at Parts and Labour, Arts on Main, until December 9. Lace’s exhibition, A Tendency Towards Complexity, is showing at CIRCA on Jellicoe until December 3

When you send Christian Nerf an e-mail these days you get an immediate response, informing you that he is “itinerant”. In other words; don’t expect a speedy response. Nerf makes a good nomad. To all intents and purposes he has been living “off the grid”, as the expression goes, for some time. That catchphrase is often used to describe militant eco-conscious folk who refuse to buy into any established systems they perceive as damaging, to live independently off conventional systems, but it seems appropriate for Nerf’s lifestyle and approach. Periodically, he is content to live without a home. Doesn’t sell his time to anyone. Well, almost – his cigarette addiction might be one of the few reasons he exchanges money. And he is a reluctant artist.
“I am pleased there is a category called art that allows for people like me to exist and function,” he observes coolly.

His “off the grid” – or could it be “between grids”? – approach makes him a bit of an anarchist and, also, ironically, an artist: the good ones are always fighting against the narrow confines of what the label designates. Almost in honour of this contradiction, he is wearing an apron covered in paint when I find him inside Room, a slip of a gallery at 70 Juta in Braamfontein run by Maria Fidel Regueros.

The apron isn’t his. I gather he hasn’t painted in some time. When he dropped out of Wits Technikon art school in the late Eighties – surely the beginning of his “off the grid” stance – to pursue painting, it took him two months to discover that, despite his proficiency, he had nothing to paint.
“I needed life experience.”

A career in advertising taught him about the life he didn’t want to lead. Art school taught him that what he deemed art might not be what everyone else did. This realisation might have initially turned him away from art, propelling him into the world of advertising, but it has similarly brought him back into the fold – he likes to rub up against expectations.

The paint-splattered artist’s apron is part of a scheme to appear as a conventional artist in the makeshift studio he has established inside Room. The gallery has become the studio, collapsing process and product and avoiding this sense he has that art is “emasculated” when it moves from the studio to the gallery. In a way his Room installation, called Et Al, Et Cetera, is also a performance piece, a bit of theatre, reality theatre.

Nerf is playing an artist who resists being an artist, though this is his genuine stance. The artist uniform might be contrived but the studio he has constructed is real; all the bits and pieces – the maquettes of some of his grand schemes for public sculptures – I have seen in his Cape Town studio are here. This is the thing about his practice; as contrived – and slightly absurd – as some of his acts appear, they are all derived from a genuine place.

Take his recent work, dubbed Nog ’n Piep, in which he “collaborated” with three of his deceased friends – Sebastian Charilaou, Crispian Plunkett and Ricardo de Carvalho – during a residency at the Sober & Lonely Institute for Contemporary Art in Joburg. The premise for the work was farcical, but it was grounded in a very real interest.
“We all have to start dealing with death. I don’t subscribe to the belief that there is life after death, so it was an opportunity for myself to explore their [my dead friends] continued existence, and how it is caused by our memories. I was trying to find out what were the key things that made them make me what I am.
“It wasn’t easy even to gather the thoughts around doing this, it is something I have been avoiding. I want to re-understand what it is like to work with others. It was interesting to open myself up to that and be in their presence for a whole week.”

There was an elegiac undertone to some of the acts, which were a repetition of ones he had performed with other people before – such as drawing with Jared Ginsburg – but was now forced to perform solo. In this way he reflected on what it was like to carry on “collaborating” with someone who was no longer present, as well as the nature of collaboration – does it demand a physical presence?

While the prospect of setting out to work with people who were dead seemed preposterous, flippant and humorous, it carried a certain gravitas. Nerf sums this up as “doing stupid things with a straight face”. What also particularly appealed to him about this project was the futility of it. “I like to pursue things that are pointless.”

This ties in with his “off-the-grid” ethos, though he would never declare it as such; he doesn’t follow a single guiding philosophy. Superficially, at least, his performance work evinces an interest in disrupting the spectator’s programmed responses. This aspect is most likely an inverted application of the skills he developed in advertising; a form of manipulation directed at deprogramming the audience, destabilising expectations and waking them up from a kind of stupor – he is frustrated by the sheep mentality that pervades society. In fact, he takes delight in pushing his audience to the point where they walk out of his performances, challenging the limits of civility.

Nerf’s Believe you Me (also titled If Only Art Was A Four Letter Word) will premiere at Gipca’s (Gordon Institute of Performing Arts) inaugural Live Art Festival, which seems the ideal setting for his work, his resistance to fitting neatly into any box. Conceived by Jay Pather, the festival is pioneering a platform for performance that resists classification; theatre that is not quite theatre, art that shares links with dance.

Nerf’s piece is geared to shift audience expectations. “I want to talk about issues of truth, disinformation and information and how prejudice leads us to believe what we are going to get. I really want to set up scenarios to trust the audience and then shake-up a few things that they thought about art.

“And if some of them have seen what I have being doing all these years and have faith in me, I want to break that down. And for people that think I am an absurdist just because I don’t use the logic of the day, I will use systems that exist. Once there has been some confusion and laughter things will start happening,” he says with a grin.

Nerf has premeditated the performance to a certain degree, but likes to leave it largely unplanned.
“I don’t want to take a pre-organised experiment and coldly deliver it to other people, what are you getting out of it? I want to be part of the people that learn something.”

For this reason Nerf is hoping that what he hasn’t planned,
doesn’t go according to plan.
“I like the idea of having to watch the footage afterwards to see what the fuck was going on.”

Gipca’s Live Art Festival runs from November 30 to December 4 in Cape Town. Nerf’s Believe You Me will be staged in the Cape Town City Hall on December 2. Athi Patra Ruga, Boris Nitikin, Michael McGarry, Richard Antrobus, Nelisiwe Xaba and Murray Kruger are some of the artists performing during this extensive festival. Image above is of Nerf with frequent collaborator Rubens de Carvalho. Picture: Lisa Mackay

Neville Petersen expects a song and dance when he arrives at a mine shaft. East Rand Proprietary Mines South East Vertical (SEV) shaft in Boksburg has been closed since 2005, but there are a few guards stationed at the entrance who aren’t keen to let us in. It’s not the buried wealth underground that needs protecting, or even the dilapidated structures above ground, it is simply a knee-jerk reaction; this compulsion to conceal its business from the prying eyes of strangers. After 15 minutes of patient negotiations, Petersen returns to the car and parks it under a large tree overhanging the driveway. We must wait for a more senior security manager to allow us entry into the mine’s premises. A group of men are tending to the manicured gardens leading up to the entrance.

There seems little reason now to maintain appearances; the only visitors are unwanted. They are mostly scavengers that enter under the dark cloak of night to steal cables. And then, there is Petersen, a former photojournalist who has made a habit of roaming around these abandoned institutions with a camera attached to his eye. This is his third or fourth visit to SEV, but he sees new things here all the time; because the imposing shaft building and all the dilapidated machinery and empty buildings are caught in an aggressive state of entropy, their exteriors are constantly changing. Nothing remains stagnant, not even a decommisioned mine.

There are all sorts of logical explanations for Petersen’s fixation with these edifices – it is the buildings, the discarded machinery that capture his interest. It might have something to do with growing up on the East Rand, Springs, in-between two mines. The imposing architecture of the shafthead frame is imprinted on his consciousness as in much the same way as the blue of a highveld sky. So, perhaps it was always written in the stars that he would one day want to survey the activities connected to this enduring motif, untangling the mystery that they weaved into his childhood dreams.

There are few Joburg-based photographers or artists who have not sought to represent the mines at some time in their career. Everyone from William Kentridge to Sam Nhlengethwa, to Natasha Christopher have grappled with this phenomenon. Currently, an exhibition of the images from David Goldblatt’s seminal photographic essay On the Mines, are being exhibited alongside Alfredo Jaar’s lightbox images of an opencast mine in north-eastern Brazil at the Goodman Gallery in Joburg.

This exhibition had been planned for some time, to coincide with the publication of a new edition of the acclaimed 1973 book by Goldblatt, but it fortuitously tied in with the renewed interest in the politics attached to the mining industry that the Marikana massacre generated. Of course, as the industry accounts for the rise of Joburg, the city’s identity is tied to it, but it has also provided the stage for prevailing power relations to be enacted.

The tragic events at Marikana brought this sharply into relief, evoking the twisted relations between the miners, unions, Lonmin, the police and the state itself. So, in a way the conditions around mining and the nature of the relationships it produces, has become a touchstone for the state of our nation. For Kentridge, particularly in his charcoal animations, the deep penetration the shafthead frame facilitates operates as a metaphor, for not only the imperial gaze but greedy exploitation. There is a sense that once this grand machine is set in motion and the pattern of exploitation is set, it cannot be stopped.

“Through these gates walk the safest men and women in the industry,” reads a sign at the entrance of SEV.
The mining industry isn’t unaware of how it is perceived. The manicured gardens and the suggestion box near the entrance are some of the small gestures towards deflecting negative perceptions. When we are finally given the go-ahead to enter the SEV premises, Petersen makes a beeline for the shafthead frame.

Three security guards trail us and watch us from a distance, perplexed as a speechless Petersen approaches his muse. It’s easy to see why this complex erection with an intricate interlacing of steel constructions interests him. In a way it looks like the spine or skeleton of a building that has yet to be completed. There are no superfluous decorative elements to it; everything is functional.

It brings to mind one of Goldblatt’s photographs of a makeshift wooden chair for the use of a barber, who presumably visited from time to time to provide haircuts for the miners. The photograph was taken in 1965 outside a compound on the Luipaardsvlei Estates, Krugersdorp. It’s not a sturdy structure; a lopsided bench is pressed up against a flat pole. It’s the crudeness of it that resonates with the architecture of the shafthead frame, and, much of the other structures at the mine. It is as if all civility, all niceties and small comforts, have been stripped away.

So perhaps it is no wonder that this industry above all others is associated with exploitation; there is a sense here that the architecture, the design, has facilitated a form of dehumanisation. Or perhaps we read this industrial architecture through the lens of the history and politics attached to this industry?

Wandering around an abandoned mine forces an intimate relationship with the architecture. This might have been what appealed to Goldblatt in the mid-1960s when he began shooting – also choosing vacant spaces. The diverse edifices attached to mines speak in ways that subjects can’t; you also aren’t forced into the uncomfortable position of summoning a fleeting form of empathy.

It isn’t just the crude structures, summoning the dehumanising culture that mining has perpetuated, that are important, but even the ornate ones that exude the imbalance of power, such as Goldblatt’s 1965 image of a pretty Victorian house belonging to a general manager in New Kleinfontein, Benoni.

This is in stark contrast to the 1965 image of the remains of a miner’s bunk at New State Mines, near Springs. One of the exterior walls of the structure has fallen down, allowing light into what must have been a dark hovel but for the colourful pin ups that decorate a wall. The miners’ hostels and other staff quarters are no longer standing at SEV. They were demolished some time ago and the land was sold, erasing the stories, the history tied to them.

SEV was established in the late 1800s, now it is embedded in a suburb of Boksburg: you approach the mine via quiet suburban streets that once belied the hard graft being carried out at subterranean levels.
“Some mines are slowly taken apart, when I return to them they have changed, there is less and less to see,” observes Petersen as we walk through the detritus of buildings, cracked glass and broken bricks that litter the ground. We are crushing what’s left under our feet.

It’s not just the gradual degradation that keeps the 50-something photographer making repeat trips to the mines but the actuality that what’s left of them will be destroyed completely. Part of his mission is to document these places before they disappear. In the five-odd years that he has been pursuing this offbeat passion, he has observed how this industry has shrunk.
“When I started there were mines that had 16 working shafts, now they only have eight left. The business is slowing down, it feels like a dying culture.”

For this reason he also photographs shafts that are still in operation – his aim is to record every mine in South Africa. He photographed the Aurora mine just weeks after its workers were told to leave; in one photograph, dubbed Unfashionable, miners’ clothing is suspended in baskets from the ceiling in the change house. It’s as if their absence is temporary and their return imminent.

Photographing disused shafts appeals to him the most; it’s the aesthetics of degeneration that seem to appeal to him. We enter a building without a roof, the paint on the walls has almost completely been eroded by the elements. There are still shards of glass held into the window frames. Petersen stops to shoot the shafthead frame through a shattered window. Immersed in this setting it’s hard to believe that this place once generated wealth and power. This is perhaps what keeps Petersen returning; the sense of disbelief and, paradoxically, relief that this notion engenders – this place has been divested of its influence.

It is in the tranquil engine or winding room that the arrest of power is most palatable. This is where large circular electric winding drums are located. The hoisting or winding ropes that allow the cage or kibble to descend or rise into or out of the shaft are coiled around these drums, so, in a way this is the heart of the action. Some time ago, that is. The concrete floor is almost completely covered in a fine layer of bird faeces and feathers. It is ironic that this bastion of industrial power has fallen into the clutches of pigeons.

“I see this everywhere I go. The pigeons get into all these buildings at some stage,” observes Petersen, before he moves off quickly – the winding room is his favourite area of the mine. He disappears into a small office located above a large drum. A door creaks closed, I see a flash go off. Chipped wooden boards bearing safety instructions and shift times and duties are still pinned to the walls. Traces of human activity are everywhere.

Jaar is fixated with (the cost of) human struggle in his study of the Serra Pelada, an opencast mine in a remote part of north-eastern Brazil. There are no machines enabling this mining, just the human body toiling in the earth, fighting against nature in the raw pursuit of survival. The miners don’t wear any protective gear and are covered in a film of mud that lends a shimmer to their skin, making them appear uniform and animal-like.

They bring to mind the Orcs, a race of sentient slaves toiling in the dark depths of Middle Earth, as depicted in Peter Jackson’s filmic rendition of JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Jaar doesn’t isolate individuals, the miners are anonymous, appearing en masse.

So, in a way he doesn’t aim to give them expression through his photography; redeem their status as individuals. He is interested in them as part of a phenomenon and because of this the display of the photographs – in the lightbox – is important as were the sites of display in New York’s subway where the images were initially installed when they were shown in the late eighties.

Jaar was looking to draw attention to the exploitation of Third World workers for the benefit of First World citizens as facilitated by a neo-liberal capitalist economy. The scenes he presents seem so extreme they appear contrived; like the dystopian fantasy world of Tolkien’s imagination.

Like Goldblatt, Jaar intended to expose human suffering by offering evidence of the reality of the conditions.
Goldblatt took a less sensationalist route; though he, too, documents the actual labour with a series of images shot underground. They are blurred and grainy as if the heat and condensation in the air has permeated, warped the film. However, it is a photograph of thousands of shovels retrieved from underground in a salvage yard in Randfontein estates in 1965 that subtly and powerfully evokes human struggle.

Miners trapped underground brought Petersen to various mine shafts during the time he worked as a journalist – first for The Citizen, then Beeld. He was confined to makeshift press rooms during those occasions and saw little of the premises. It was only after a long break from photojournalism that his interest had a chance to develop and blossom, and he began to hunt down decommisioned mines using Google Earth.

Petersen is hoping to transition into the art world with his photographs, though there is something quite mechanical and journalistic about them. The subject matter might make them sufficiently attractive to gallerists and buyers. These images are his gold; like a miner, he, too, has been retrieving them from the murky depths of forgotten places.

He has been sitting on them for some time, only choosing to show them for the first time at the Joburg Fringe during the Joburg Art Fair. The Marikana massacre has added relevancy to his work, while in turn, in documenting the gradual shrinking of the industry, he indirectly evinces the reasons that the fight to maintain it might become dirtier.

Thousands of miners lost their jobs when SEV closed. Presently, it employs only a handful of security guards, who shadow us back to the car.- published in The Sunday Independent, December 04, 2012

l On The Mines and Gold in the Morning are showing at the Goodman Gallery until December 14. Top image: Workers left this change house more than two years ago; now only their meagre belongings represent them in their absence. Picture by Neville Petersen. Below: A mine policeman’s sentry box and demolished lavatory, New Modder, Benoni, August 1966. Picture: David Goldblatt

‘Is he just going to stand there all night?” asks the little girl standing on a wooden bench in front of Athi-Patra Ruga’s Hope Street studio windows. A large crowd gathered in front of the building before the blinds were raised, revealing not one, but two performers. Which one was Ruga?

Ruga and Jade Paton’s upper bodies are hidden behind a plethora of balloons holding luminous liquid. Legs concealed in fishnet stockings and ending in pairs of matching red satin high-heels support these bulbous entities, which don’t look too dissimilar from a bunch of grapes. A neon light at the base of the window brings all the neon shades in their costumes, and in the images pinned to the walls in the room, into sharp relief.

It is like a scene from Amsterdam’s red light district, but for the fact that not a single inch of their bodies is on display and they are not stereotypical female personas, but The Future White Women of Azania – an unknown population still in the making. They appear like mannequins, too, though they totter from side to side, like inebriated whores, struggling to remain inert as their heels slide on the neon liquid released from the balloons as they pop.It is a gradual “striptease”, each burst balloon promising to bring us closer to the identities concealed behind the wall of bright plastic.

“This is boring,” declares the opinionated little girl. The balloons aren’t popping fast enough to hold her fickle attention. We’ve learnt to be patient. Performance art isn’t only a test of physical endurance for the performers but for the audience too. We expect to be bored at times. We need to feel trapped in the present in order to grasp its presentness, the weight of it. After all, some define performance art as “life itself, it doesn’t represent or portray”, or so reads a blurb touted by the organisers of the inaugural Venice International Performance Art Week that takes place in December.
Performance art is also finding new platforms in South Africa – mostly due to the efforts of one individual, Jay Pather, who has used his clout to help establish a division for this discipline at the National Arts Festival, a Standard Bank Award for a young artist achieving in this area – Anthea Moys was its inaugural recipient – and is responsible for initiating the Live Art festival in Cape Town.

Unlike many performance art projects in Joburg, this one isn’t about the city itself, or engaging with spaces in it, though performances are staged in a variety of locations, from a university campus to a hippie farm near Tamboerskloof. The Live Art Festival is about exploring, presenting the diversity of performance-based art.
“Live Art” is a term that Pather and his colleagues from UCT’s Gordon Institute of Performing Arts (Gipca) have borrowed from the University of Bristol, where they apparently have a live art development unit, which makes it sound like some kind of scientific experiment. Their definition of “live art” could easily apply to performance art: according to them it is “art work that broadly embraces ephemeral, time-based, visual and performing arts events that include a human presence and broaden, challenge or question traditional views of the arts”.

So why not just call it a performance art festival? Live Art implies an openness to other fields of performance hailing from the worlds of theatre, dance and perhaps even sport, that performance art perhaps doesn’t, or so the thinking must be. The term is also meant to designate a strategy rather than a form, it states in the publicity material, though it is hard to identify among the diverse works at this festival any common strategy informing them other than the delivery of live action.
Umbrella terms attract a different set of problems; a festival curated under such a wide-ranging banner risks incoherency and this fashionable effort to resist staking or claiming any territory stifles a perceivable discourse, or body to map. However, given the infancy of a flourishing performance art scene here and its fragmentation - some artists are aligned to the theatre world, others dance - perhaps there is no cohesive body yet to claim. The broad framing presents a snapshot of the breadth of performance work being generated.The subtitle of this festival – “make up your own mind” – also has a fashionable ring to it; it’s all about the audience’s experience these days. In reality artists are constantly training us to receive their brand of work, generating our expectations then perhaps working at dismantling them.

The residents of the building above Ruga’s studio largely have yet to be inducted into the world of performance art, though one of the country’s rising stars in this field has been toiling on the ground floor. In fact, daily, you could say he is on display, though he doesn’t normally work in a pair of fishnets. On the night of the performance, there is friction outside; a man drags his child away from the window and someone drops a water bomb over a balcony, soaking some in the crowd. Some wonder if the act of sabotage isn’t orchestrated by Ruga; it mirrors his own actions – and performance art offers these surprises, doesn’t it? Eventually, even Ruga loses patience with his own act, and he starts bursting the balloons at a fast rate, bringing the performance to its anti-climax: there is no reveal, there is no hidden identity behind the balloon façade.

The balloon screen is an extreme embodiment of an artificial mask; full of air, it has no substance, it’s pretty and transparent, though plastic and temporary. Ruga dismantles the mask violently, each pop announcing its inevitable demise. There isn’t anyone behind the mask; even Ruga the performer checks out when the balloons have all been popped. The strip is what counts, not the identity it threatens to reveal.

Hlengiwe Lushaba Madlala also begins her performance, Highway to Heaven/Paradise Road, concealed behind a thick façade; a wall of tyres, from which she emerges, howling with pain. Sdu Majola soothes her cries, placates her agonised yells with comforting words as he rolls a tyre around the makeshift stage in Hiddingh Hall. She isn’t hiding behind this rubber façade, but instead is trapped within it. Towards the end she frees herself from the circular bind, but not completely; Majola, too, concludes with a tyre around his neck.

A number of performers luxuriate in the liberty of not being confined by dress or some other restrictive construction limiting the body, identity, by performing in the buff. We find Tebogo Munyai doing a headstand with a lit candle in his rear when we enter the theatre to watch Qina ke Qawe. His penis is concealed in white bandages that are in stark contrast to the black paint that covers his body, which appears perfect in every way. He satiates our hungry gaze, revealing every part of himself. Text projected on a screen behind him alludes to coming to terms with corporeal realities, being in touch with how the body responds to encounters as he crumps his lithe frame.

Nudity, revelling in it, is the topic of Mozambican dancing duo, Benjamin Manhica and Mtanyane Abilio’s piece A Nudez. But as with Thabiso Pule and Hector Thami Manekehla’s Penis Politics, they move between being dressed and disrobing.The latter piece is more successful; it’s amusing and cheeky, parodying, deflating male bravado. It concludes with the duo swaying their penises back and forth, in not only a proud display of their manhood but in a satirical send-up of it. The audience laughs.

In contrast, Themba Mbuli’s Dark Cell, performed during a gale-force wind in a courtyard at the Michaelis campus, evokes indignities performed on the black male body during the apartheid era, associating nudity with a loss of dignity and control, summoning the counter-argument during The Spear of the Nation imbroglio. By recalling these historical acts through his naked body, however, he reclaims power.

We come to expect nudity; ultimately this is a festival about the body. After British-born Jamie Lewis Hadley’s rationalised act of ordering white tiles on the floor into a neat square before cutting himself with a blade and systematically breaking each tile with his bloodied hand, it perhaps wasn’t surprising that someone asked why he hadn’t performed the act nude. Of course, this performance was engineered to minimise vulnerability and maintain distance by establishing systems (however warped) to channel emotion. Fittingly, he is dressed in an outfit befitting a racing car driver, though his is a quiet act of calculated risk.

Boris Nikitin, the Swiss-born theatre director-cum-curator (hybrid careerists are ideal for this festival), initially steers us towards a comfortable place in the Imitation of Life. The Little Theatre at UCT is a conventional one but it appears as if the process of theatre has been laid bare; the stage looks more like the backstage; ladders, boxes and chairs are stacked and Malte Scholtz and Beatrice Fleischlin, the two performers, are trying to convince us they are not performing at all. They share some of their acting techniques – how to cry on demand – but in sharing intimate details of their lives (such as when they first masturbated) we believe we know their actual identities. It’s a lecture mode of delivery but amusing; the laughter aids us in dropping our guard before Nikitin gradually navigates us into a different sort of performance. It is Scholtz who appears to be most surprised by the transition, when he realises that, in the retelling and acting out of a drunken tale, he has slipped into another reality.

The lights in the theatre start flickering as the house lights go down, signalling our entry into a more conventional and contrived/artificial performance. Fleischlin and Scholtz are in different outfits and wear different expressions; we can perceive how their identities (fictional or real) have been emptied in service of these vacant vessels that sway to the music and perform stylised gestures. There is something menacing about them; they’re like zombies, capable of anything – and nothing.

Traces of the actors’ identities slip through; when Fleischlin cries we know how she has summoned those tears. After a series of false endings, one of which sees these “zombies” collapse face forward on to the ground as if they are puppets, we leave Nikitin’s performance with a sense that we have journeyed back and forth through the complex corridors of performance, where acting, non-acting, fiction and non-fiction run parallel to each other and intersect.

By the time we are sitting in a confined room on the same campus to watch Nikitin’s second work, Woyzeck, we are more prepared for his tricks – his modus operandi. Or so we think. We are tricked into another false ending, which sees Nikitin in discussion with the audience, before our questions and comments are repeated back to us through Scholtz. Our feedback has become the text for the performance.
Nikitin makes clever work that not only prompts some interesting questions around the “live” theme, attaching it to more existential ideas rather than just the semantics around performance terms or non-terms, but also sets a bar for performance. His work is more complex and rounded than any of the others at the festival. It may have something to do with his training in theatre and his relationship to text. Nevertheless, it sets up expectations that few of the other works are able to match.

Largely, the festival comprises fragments of work, beginnings of performances or ideas that have yet to evolve, may never become complete, resolved works. Some works are crude in delivery and form; Chuma Sopotela rolls on the ground on the Grand Parade opposite the Cape Town City Hall yelling “labour, economy”.
Cumulatively, these performance fragments coalesce into an interesting body and presumably that was the idea behind the tight programme that sees us move excitedly from room to room, site to site, to see the next instalment.

There is no time to process or even discuss performances; they blur into each other eventually and it’s hard to retain all the details. This, ultimately, is the spirit of the “live” act; its full force can be felt only in the present. - published in The Sunday Independent, December 9, 2012.

Pic above: Athi-Patra Ruga's Future White Women of Azania and below: Malte scholtz in Boris Nikitin's Woyzeck. Pics by Ashley Walters

On the floor are stacked layers of tiles and bones, next to a porcelain dog that looks like it is guarding the installation. It’s one of many Kemang Wa Lehuleres that fill the first room of the Stevenson gallery. It’s like a neat cross-section of a disaster site - a clinical excavation. The title, I can’t laugh any more, when I can’t laugh I can’t… (2012) speaks of this incongruent mix of trauma and kitsch, this oscillation between digging into a past horror, while acknowledging the act of digging is clichéd.

The gallery is surprisingly empty, given it’s the opening night, but then there are four other openings or events in the Woodstock area – so the art-going-loving-buying-crowd is spread thinly between Blank, the new experimental space dubbed “Evil Son”, the Goodman and Whatiftheworld.

My companion, Malibongwe Tyilo, aka Skattie, the infamous fashion blogger of Skattie What are You Wearing, has slim pickings; fashionable or stylish gallerinas are his niche market and there are only a few old ladies knocking about the gallery. He snaps one of them, wearing a pair of silver trainers, and me in one of my statement necklaces. It’s one of five that I have brought to Cape Town as part of my Art Week Cape Town survival kit, which also includes a box of Panados (to counter headaches brought on by cheap wine at openings), the handy Artweek map, and a smartphone for tweeting and photographing so I can keep track of the work I like.

There is a lot to see and process, with two or three openings a night over the space of a week. While the Joburg art scene has wound down by mid-November – there is not an opening until next year – it’s high art season in Cape Town. December and January are the most lucrative months for galleries, what with the city brimming with affluent tourists and visitors.

Few are, however, risking it with a solo show; except for the Goodman, which was due to open with a new William Kentridge exhibition wryly titled No, it is. But then it’s Kentridge, one of the most bankable local artists. Largely, it’s only public institutions that are showing solo exhibitions; the AVA is showing La Sape, a collection of painted portraits by Zambian artist Zemba Luzamba and, at the Iziko SA National Art Gallery, Mikhael Subotzky’s Retinal Shift and Jared Thorne’s exhibition, Black Folk, are being exhibited.

Interestingly, Luzamba and Thorne, both foreigners, are tackling representations of black identity, though from different angles. Luzamba is interested in how black male identity hinges on the business suit, though this is juxtaposed with a painting depicting the various uniforms or historical costumes that bell hops or porters might wear. He demonstrates how clothing activates a sense of authority or an illusion of it – the porter might wear a smart costume but in this context it is not a symbol of power but servitude.

Thorne’s exhibition is slightly more complex; his subjects wear outfits from the fashionable to the conventional; they are young, affluent, and probably well-educated black South Africans. It’s supposed to be an ironic study of positive role models of blackness. In other words, it is engineered to counter another (absent) body. There is something of a glossy magazine feel to some of the images; they could be adverts but for the fact that they are not styled or stylised. His subjects are stiff; they know they are being observed and are perhaps each negotiating the terms or reasons for the context. What do they symbolise? They are materially, socially and politically “free” – can these facts facilitate transcendence of blackness?

Most of the commercial galleries are spreading their bets with group shows to cater for every taste. Want a sculpture? You should probably snap up a Kyle Morland or a Rodan Kane Hart, two young Cape Town artists who are looking at becoming permanent fixtures on the scene down here.The two seem to be pursuing this new brand of formalism that seems to have taken hold. This kind of work doesn’t require any exhausting decoding; their dry titles aptly describe what the works are; Morland’s got an Inverted Saddle Cut, and Hart Two Brass Plates in Tension showing at Blank Projects gallery in a show aptly titled When Form becomes Attitude. It’s a witty show.

It’s Jared Ginsberg’s Ladder and White Line (yes, that’s what it is) that tickles. The white line in question is a piece of rope that is constantly moving; a motor whips it around every so often, constantly shifting its form. I like the idea of a line as a sculpture, and one that's not static but is repeated and possesses possibilities, though it is fixed too. The installation has an Art Povera feel about it that also appeals.

Nico Krijno also creates his compositions from a variety of found things; vegetables, printed fabrics, a tree, a couple of pillars. Pattern Content #1 is a photograph of garish printed materials placed together; it exudes a strong Eighties aesthetic in line with the long-standing Eighties revival that has been shaping the nature of our wardrobes. The work thus feels fashionable, there is a vacancy to it. This sense of vacuity, and tackiness even, pervades the show and maybe it’s unavoidable: we’re so used to loaded conceptual statements. The work here has a sort of DIY-popness to it that is satisfying in terms of rallying against the fastidiousness that a focus on form has historically entailed. Perhaps this is punk-formalism? To the gallery’s credit, this group show is underpinned by a cohesive visual and discursive signature. So many of these summer-time group shows-cum-commercial drives are not well curated, if at all. They are simply a miscellany of work by artists who happen to mostly be from Cape Town and are affiliated to these galleries.

Vague, broad-sweeping titles afford this phenomenon. Pretty much any work by any artist could be exhibited under the banner that Brundyn + Gonsalves were flogging as Material/Representation. This postmodern turn involving the rejection of single narratives seems to have been rather glibly exploited by gallerists. It’s hard to read art in these contexts; in the absence of a theme that thoughtfully engages or draws out a particular aspect in it and other works by an artist that ground it within a trajectory or body, they tend to function as floating islands.

For some reason – it’s so often inexplicable, irrational even – it’s Matthew Hindley’s The Meat and the Bone series that lingers in my imagination for days after viewing Material/Representation. Perhaps it’s because I can’t place it. The series consists of small paintings of a group of naked young people that appear to be held captive. In one, two blindfolded women wait in an empty dark room. There is a retro feel to the rendering that recalls illustrations from Hardy Boys covers. They are inquisitive young people who’ve been burned by their curiosity. Their naivety and innocence has brought them to this (abstract) place that sits outside of the world. They have yet to grasp the gravity of the situation. Or maybe they are not trapped at all, but enacting a twisted ritual of their creation, something that mirrors, runs parallel to what occurs in the real world.

A similar work of his is also showing at Smac’s Paint I: Contemporary South African Painting 2002-2012. The same names pop up everywhere; Sanell Aggenbach is showing works at two other shows including this one. Are there too few (Cape Town) artists to go around, or are only a handful bankable? This sprawling exhibition is divided between two large galleries and it boasts some of the best contemporary painters – Mary Wafer, and the now über popular Georgina Gratrix – but it doesn’t feel like a comprehensive survey. It feels disjointed and doesn’t illuminate the shifts that have been ocurring in painting.

It’s a delight to see Johannes Phokela’s South Pacific Seascape for the simple fact I saw him working on it a few years ago before his large solo at the Standard Bank in 2009. It was supposed to go on show for that exhibition and wasn’t completed in time. The painting’s cheeky subversion of colonial rhetoric bears no relationship to the paintings around it. This is a glorified showroom, like a furniture factory where a room’s elements have been crudely disassembled.

This lack of cohesiveness, this sense of fragmentation, might not simply be explained by a lack of curatorial talent in this city or an overriding commercial imperative, but could have something to do with the fact that artists in this city – country – are pursuing a multitude of themes via a diverse set of (visual) languages that cannot be united. This retreat from the political that this punk formalism spells – this anti-idea art that creates a space for artists to bypass the political – implies a desire to move beyond old tropes. This echoes in Wa Lehulere's installation. South African art is no longer defined by easily identifiable pursuits. This is a good thing.

This idea is brought home by the group show Positive Tension, at the Whatiftheworld Gallery which, above all, seems to be centred on showing new work by emerging contemporary artists - despite the sexy title, which points to this nuanced friction between the political and apolitical, the conceptual and post-conceptual punk formalism. I am reaching for labels because I want to name what is informing these works but realise in doing so that they evade these limited tags.

There are political undertones in some of the works by Athi-Patra Ruga, Julia Rosa Clark and Rowan Smith, but there’s some formalism too in the shape of another Hart sculpture dubbed The Illusionistic Bend and a few John Murray abstract paintings. But even Hart and Murray are driving different ends of the stick.
Hart’s work is laden with architectural references that summon a dissection or distillation of urban forms. These discrete elements aren't teased out through the display; the exhibition feels clumsily arranged.

Perhaps gallerists are expecting art critics to write the narratives underpinning South African art and make sense of it.

Serious curating is supposed to be the domain of public art institutions, so perhaps it is too much to expect nuanced displays in commercial galleries. However, in this country, where the former have such limited resources, the latter have come to see themselves as hybrid players; fulfilling a service to the public and the arts community while turning a profit. Maybe only the larger players can afford such altruism, such as the Stevenson gallery, where the strongest group exhibition is on show. It’s rather grandly titled Fiction as Fiction (or a ninth Johannesburg Biennale) and is curated by Joost Bosland. It has an international feel not only because it boasts work by artists from other countries – such as the now fashionable destination for art, China – and local artists that show and/or live in other countries (Robin Rhode and Nicholas Hlobo), but the theme is unpacked through a diverse range of voices that complicate it, rather than explicate it. It’s the only group show that demands a second viewing – and embraces the possibility of film in the context of art. But its scope is also limited by its commercial imperative; only work by locals represented by the gallery is shown here.

By the time the Stevenson fills with the kind of gallerinas Tyilo hunts, he has moved to another venue. We are both looking for the same thing; someone who plays with the rules, sets themselves apart. The only difference is that fashionable art has a hollow ring to it. - published in The Sunday Independent, December 16, 2012.

Read my in-depth review of Fiction as Fiction at Stevenson in the January 6 edition of The Sunday Independent. Positive Tension shows at Whatiftheworld Gallery until January 26 as does Paint I: Contemporary SA Painting at Smac Cape Town. When form becomes Attitude shows at Blank Projects until January 19. Material/Representation closes on January 23.

Images:top: Nico Krijno’s Composition with Pillars and Tree, on show at Blank Projects’ Form with Attitude
Middle: The Meat and the Bone III by Matthew Hindley is on show at Brondyn + Gonsalves
Bottom: The Illusionistic Bend 4 (2012) by Rodan Kane Hart, which is showing as part of Positive Tension at the Whatiftheworld Gallery

Can artists or photographers make work about the land without depicting it? This is the question I was interested in pursuing when I arrived at the Bus Factory in Joburg to view the Transition exhibition. It is the culmination of a project that saw six South African photographers teamed with six of their French contemporaries, as part of the French/SA Seasons 2012/2013, falling under the banner of the broader Social Landscape Project, which also included a display of snapshots by the public that were similarly centred on representations of "the land", probably one of the most loaded topics.

It's a kind of no-brainer theme but, because of this, it is tricky to say something new, to navigate it somewhere unexpected. Not that inventiveness or edginess is a hallmark of the French/SA Seasons projects; this cultural accord has more to do with exchange; in this context perhaps a visual conversation between local and French photographers, who appear to have been paired off, or chose to work independently, and were dispatched to different parts of the country that the curators, John Fleetwood, head of the Market Photo Workshop, and Francois Hébel, director of Les Rencontres d'Arles, had identified as sites linked to fraught historical legacies.

The title Transition attaches a caveat to these essays, alluding to the fact that these places are caught up in change or have been the catalyst for transformations of some kind. In this way the rural places or small towns, which are privileged in these works, are not static, or irrelevant in terms of illuminating larger national issues.

In this past year, no site has been more clearly linked to an impending need for transformation than the area of Marikana. The trouble at the platinum mine in this location forms the backdrop for Thabiso Sekgada and Philippe Chancel's photographs. Protesting miners appear in a few shots, but they cast their gaze wider, teasing out quite different themes, or perhaps the curators establish them. What is most striking about Sekgada's is the juxtaposition between the rural, untamed landscape, and makeshift structures in it with the sleek, imposing industrial architecture of the factories, mines. It highlights the discrepancy in power and material conditions between multinationals and their Third World employees and the clash such differences might engender. It is an image of a makeshift toilet made from corrugated iron in a grassy barren land adjacent to a large factory in the background that brings this glaring visual discrepancy starkly into focus.
The cavernous interior of the Bus Factory seems an unlikely venue for a photographic exhibition, but for the passing traffic of theatre and art people toiling in the building. A few images are framed, the rest are copies glued to long white partitions, imparting an informal quality to the show, albeit that some of the biggest names in South African photography - Santu Mofokeng, who has been selected for the German contribution to the 55th Venice Biennale, Jo Ractliffe, Zanele Muholi, who showed at Documenta (13) this year and Pieter Hugo - are represented here. The casual or informal display was intended to challenge the way in which photographic images have been co-opted and presented in gallery settings and thus positioned as "master-pieces", explained Fleetwood. The absence of titles and dates appearing with the images - they are contained in a separate catalogue - is also part of this drive to somehow detach these well-known photographers' work from the all-encompassing vocabulary of art and presumably to make the exhibition accessible. What does removing the "art" association mean for our reading of these images? Are we supposed to read them as popular culture ephemera?

Without being aware of this non-art imperative, I simply concluded that the display was simply chosen because it was inexpensive. It does have a makeshift look about it; and the wallpaper images evoke posters. Perhaps this attempt to disassociate photography from art and the invasive measures that are enacted on objects that enter this realm comes too late and is impossible to achieve when you are dealing with such big names that shoot for the art crowd. Not that they all deliver; Mofokeng's contribution, which documents the culture of protest around fracking, lacks his usual magical touch. The images simply fail to live up to his motivation for the topic in the catalogue.

A photographer of his ilk perhaps doesn't flourish within the confines of such a straightforward "assignment".
Muholi's contributions are decidedly uncharacteristic of her work too; there are no close-cropped portraits of young gay women asserting their presence, except perhaps the one encased in a coffin, a homosexual victim, who is juxtaposed with a series of colourful and ordinary wide shots of seemingly carefree young women going through the motions of the Zulu king's reed dancing ceremony. It's not just that the image of cadaver works at unsettling this series but one of a transgender male - Le Sishi - dressed in the same traditional garb as the young women participating in this annual ritual. Le Sishi obviously would not be able to participate in it - the young women's femaleness in this ceremony is solely linked to their anatomy.
What is most striking about Muholi's images is the way she tends to portray supposedly (you can't assume all the women are heterosexual) heterosexual women at the ceremony en masse, while in her treatment of a homosexual or transgender people she highlights their individuality. This may draw attention to their alienation, but she risks homogenising heterosexual women, who also fight prejudice, and also struggle under the narrow strictures of gender. It's good to see Muholi stretching herself. This collection has more dimensions to it than any of her previous work, though her images of the reed dancing ritual could be more nuanced. It is also satisfying that the work doesn't hinge on or portray the land. Instead the theme operates as a cipher for a contested space; which in this collection is the body - it is physically policed and punished.

Ractliffe's subject matter - the 31/201 Battalion of San veterans who fought in the war in Angola - doesn't come as a surprise. To some degree the collection also possesses the same visual persona that defined her remarkable series shot "on the border" in the exhibition Terras do Fim do Mundo. Ractliffe trades in banalities, ordinary overlooked sights and sites that belie hidden histories. This fact forces you to really look at the images, as if the act of looking will somehow reveal the invisible clues. The absence of captions or titles nearby enhances this.

Hugo's photographs feel typical of his approach too; in contrast to Ractliffe he captures the sensational - an old woman with a damaged eye, a house chopped in half and a cluster of trees in a semi-rural setting covered in clothing. As a result, his images capture your attention immediately, though they don't sustain your interest. But there are some here that do; such as a twosome on an empty plot of land next to a main road. They are seated in front of two small boxes on which they sell some wares. There doesn't appear to be any passing trade and, resigned to this, they fall asleep.

There is some benefit in seeing the perspectives that French photographers Harry Gruyaert and Patrick Tourneboeuf bring to the project, though the two are caught up in portraying predictable white/black wealthy/impoverished dichotomies. Gruyaert juxtaposes whites enjoying leisure time with unemployed black people, while Tourneboeuf's architectural study contrasts some ageing or neocolonial interiors with contemporary exteriors in downtown Kimberley, evincing these disjointed realities and the discrepancy between public and private worlds. But not all of the French photographers can resist taking broody romantic shots of the African landscape. - published in The Sunday Independent, December 23, 2012

Transition closes on March 15, 2013

captions: top: Near Plettenberg Bay. Waiting for work. 2012. By Harry Gruyaert. Bottom: Pieter Hugo’s Main Reef Road, Roodepoort, 2012

There is every reason not to watch Yto Barrada’s filmic work Hand-me-Downs. It’s on a small screen, you have to put on headphones and it is exhibited in the same room as two of the most powerful works on show at Fiction as Fiction (or, A Ninth Johannesburg Biennale), an intriguing installation by Ângela Ferreira that brings Jimmy Hendrix and one of the infamous Cullinans of the mining dynasty together and a ginormous black rubber sculpture by Nicholas Hlobo.

Film artworks are hard to consume in galleries. There are too many distractions – and they demand your time, attention and commitment in ways that other art doesn’t. Yet once I start watching Barrada’s film, I can’t pull myself away. It’s the cyclical narrative structure that has made a prisoner of me.

The work consists of a number of short stories, if you will, that mostly conclude with a nasty twist, sometimes a violent action that deflates the droll domestic tale. Because the stories are narrated by the same monotonous female voice, we assume they detail the events of one individual’s life, though they shift between times, places and perhaps even subjects.

Barrada won’t allow you to join the dots and build a linear narrative. These stories are loose fragments, and like a damaged or incomplete memorial sculpture that only offers a very partial view of history, what remains has been subject to embellishment – it makes sense to build on what’s left instead of trying to retrieve what has been lost. These fragments are thus built into anecdotes, and are the “hand-me-downs” in question.
They are presented as, may even be, real-life experiences that have been fictionalised through the act of narration via a number of narrators over time. This is not all these fragments have in common; they express a bleak existence where a kind of unnatural reversal has occurred.

It’s about living through a time of crisis, where the normal and everyday is warped. This is what makes them stories worth telling. In a way these structured anecdotes are the mechanism that has permitted the subjects to survive the hardships they describe. A montage of found footage is synced with the text, mirroring some of the events. It’s a clumsy collage that further reduces the truth, though it adds new layers and constantly displaces the tales.

The function and different modes of narration that define fiction are the overriding theme of this exhibition, curated by Joost Bosland, which is the third and final installation of a series of curated group shows dubbed the Trade Routes Project.They all deal with the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale, which proved to be the second and last. This fact has long been lamented by the local art world and has for obvious reasons become the subject of art historical narratives, as academics, students and writers have sought to unravel its significance and the reasons and the impact of its demise. In this way, it has, like all pivotal art moments, become the stuff of legends.

Its absence has become part of a broader discourse around a crippled and dysfunctional cultural landscape that has become more vulnerable to commercial forces – Ross Douglas, of Artlogic, the organisation that instigated and manages the Joburg Art Fair, has long-held the view that this primarily commercially-driven event has replaced the biennale. The fact that an exhibition dealing with this event is taking place at a commercial venue substantiates the shift that has occurred.

The politics surrounding biennales are not the focus of Bosland’s exhibition. This show isn’t about reflecting on the past but meditating on an imagined future; an attempt to envision what shape the cultural landscape might have become had the biennale continued, though this inevitably leads to a meta-fiction concern.
This is inevitable given the exhibition isn’t a miniaturised version, or a re-enactment, of a biennale – that is impossible. Biennales are associated with sprawling displays, often boasting large-scale works that cannot be contained in conventional museums or commercial galleries, though some of the work is of the biennale genre – if you were willing to declare such a thing existed.

Nicholas Hlobo’s Tyaphaka has been on the biennale circuit, showing at the Sydney Biennale last year, but this is not the only reason it has been included in this show; it adds a twist to the theme, which is perhaps too easily expressed via filmic products. This explains the dominance of film at this show. Film lends itself to visual (and textual) narrativising because of its sequential nature. And as Barrada’s film confirms, storytelling is a necessary ingredient to keep the viewer engaged, to keep them invested in what occurs next, though you could argue that Robin Rhode’s Yard (2011), a video of an empty shoe shifting position on a road, upturns this idea.

Hlobo’s Tyaphaka is a sequential piece. A single sculpture of two parts, with each displayed in separate rooms though the work is conjoined. You encounter the “eyes” first, which are elevated by a plinth.
These makeshift eyes aren’t embedded in a head, they are just balls, embodying the act of seeing, though ironically, they are detached and thus unable to see the large rambling black rubber body they are attached to via a long sort of umbilical cord that runs through to another room.
Tyaphaka is a Xhosa word referring to two states: one actual, having something caught in your eye, and the other metaphoric, referring to a blindness, an inability to see things for what they are.
Certainly, the first part of sculpture doesn’t prepare you for the large, amorphous body that it is attached to, so there is a very physical sense of being separated from what really exists.
Just as in a work of fiction, the end, the conclusion is delayed, forcing you to reflect on your inability to see it coming from the outset, though you derive your enjoyment from this. In this way the act of fiction relies on, exploits and in fact creates, a form of blindness.

The bloated black mass that awaits in the other room doesn’t quite function as a “conclusion”; if anything it does the reverse – it generates uncertainty, serving as a cipher for any number of objects, beings or parts of the body. I love the sense of excess; this large mass practically fills the room. There is something menacing about it; like thick larva slowly pouring into a space and petrifying everything in it.

The most striking aspect of Hlobo’s sculptural works is the fact that it is tricky to grasp whether it represents the interior or the exterior of the body; he aims to conflate the two.
This rubber mass appears like distended intestines. However, on the opening night, Hlobo wryly remarked that it could be “a giant poo”, thus implying that it was something the body excreted. Could this mass serve as a metaphor for the truths we carry within ourselves but keep concealed?
This reading does offer both socio-political and psychological interpretations that could be quite appealing, though Hlobo seems bent on keeping the work in the gutter. But ultimately, what he desires, what all artists desire, is that we impose fictions on to their works. Fictions susceptible to further ficitonalising. - published in The Sunday Independent, January 6, 2013

Fiction as Fiction (or, A Ninth Johannesburg Biennale) shows at the Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town until January 12.

Top: Ângela Ferreira’s Study for Hendrix/Cullinan Shaft and Underground Cinema (After R Smithson)

Below: Nicholas Hlobo's Tyaphaka is one of the extraordinary two-part works on show at the Stevenson as part of the Fiction as Fiction exhibition.

At the end of the year I am inevitably asked to list the art highlights. Anyone who has shared a bottle of wine with me will know I am not averse to reminiscing, but I am uneasy with making pronouncements, though this is what I do for a profession. So, for the SA Art Times I sidestepped this activity altogether, preferring to look at the "lowest common denominators" - the works, events, art world players that had mass appeal, were supposed to have mass appeal or didn't measure up to preconceived notions. For the Daily Maverick I submitted this list and below is my latest review of 2012 in The Sunday Independent, which reflects some of my more idiosyncratic interests. Sometimes, works hold some appeal for the simple fact that they coincide with what I am researching or where my head is at, at the time. Sometimes the work just turns something on in my head.

Installation shot of Wa Lehulere's works at Fiction as Fiction

Best Group/Curated Shows 2012:

Trade Routes Project: Stevenson Galleries, Cape Town and Joburg.
This series of exhibitions reflected on the last Johannesburg biennale, held in 1997. The first, Trade Routes Over Time, presented works from some of the artists that participated in the biennale. The second, If a Tree… curated by Clare Butcher, contained a few remarkable works – James Beckett’s Berea in Soap and Kemang Wa Lehulere’s 30 Minutes of Amnesia – and expressed this dislocation between time and place. Finally in Fiction as Fiction (or, A ninth Johannesburg Biennale) Joost Bosland meditated on the mechanics of imagining that arises from the desire to reclaim the past and speculate on a future the event may have enjoyed.

A Fragile Archive by Nontobeko Ntombela: Johannesburg Art Gallery
Yes, the (historical) archive, investigating it and allowing its gaps and flaws to be made visible, is terribly fashionable, and maybe Ntombela took an easy route by not making any definitive pronouncements about the work of Gladys “Nomfanekiso” Mgudlandlu and her first exhibition. However, it was an interesting premise, this attempt to restage a moment in art history. Ultimately, Ntombela revealed the contradictions and mechanics of white patronage during the apartheid era.

An Installation view of Trinity Session's retrospective at Moad

On Air Review: Trinity Session Retrospective at Moad, Joburg.
This new Maboneng venue suited this collective’s preoccupation with the liminal period of transition between entropy and gentrification, but it is the way in which Stephen Hobbs and Marcus Neustetter have turned the documentation of their psychogeographic-architectural performance films into independent products that evinced such a fascinating dialogue around the relationship between film, performance, entropy and architecture.

Best Solo Exhibitions 2012:

Wim Botha's A Thousand Things

Wim Botha’s A Thousand Things: Stevenson Joburg
This was one of the most outstanding solo shows of the year. It mostly consisted of sculptures, but it was an experiential show; an installation of sculptures that fixed you in an indefinable temporal state. The work was about art, history, politics, iconography and how they intersect, but what was remarkable was what was omitted; the architectural and formal qualities that were suggested but were not fully present.

Mikhael Subotzky’s Retinal Shift: Settler’s Monument, Grahamstown (the display at the Iziko Gallery was not as successful or meaningful – this is a site-specific show in some ways) This exhibition came as a surprise. I had not been a fan of his work; his execution and subject-matter always seemed so predictable. It is significant that his most interesting, or should we say, conceptually sophisticated exhibition was for a non-commercial project. He turned the lens on himself, embracing a form of self-reflexivity that propelled a realisation that manipulating existing imagery can be more interesting than generating them. In the film work, Moses and Griffiths, not only does he move into a new medium of image production but assumes to play with the documentary form.

Deborah Poynton’s Land of the Cockaigne: Stevenson Johannesburg.

Poynbton's Land of the Cockaigne 2

When I reviewed this show it formed part of a short dialogue around this new formalism I have been observing, particularly in painting, though Blank Project’s recent Form with Attitude clearly shows it is evolving in other mediums too.
Superficially, Poynton’s work appears to sit outside this trend, but the sense of “emptiness” that belies her highly detailed neo-baroque style brings to mind the level of vacuity that other painters – Georgina Gratrix, Carla Busutill, and Jan Henri Booyens – aspire to, except she conceals it beneath the veneer of realism. This is what makes her work so interesting. It doesn’t overstate its emptiness, or rather, ironically, it is expressed via abundance. In other words you don’t have to reduce forms to revel in their physical values.

Best Performance Art Works 2012:

Jay Pather’s Qaphela Caesar!: Johannesburg Stock Exchange, Dance Umbrella.
This wasn’t a critics’ favourite, with many finding it too dense, too long. However, these are the very characteristics I enjoyed in this abstraction of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. It is the density and excess of Pather’s work that ensures its ephemerality and his desire to hold/relay the weight of reality. However, it was the installation work in the vacated offices of the former JSE before the spectacle that left a lasting impression. A dancer sitting paralysed in a vacant office filled to the brim with shredded paper, succinctly captured the erased, absent history that haunts this building, and country.

Boyzie Cekwana

Boyzie Cekwana and Panaibra Gabriel Canda’s Inkomati (Dis)cord: Dance Factory, Danse L’Afrique Danse.
This is an old work that explored the traduced accord between South Africa and Mozambique during the apartheid era and the inability of these two young producers to access history. It remains remarkable for the fact that Cekwana and Canda created a truly interdisciplinary work that operates at the intersection between performance art, dance and theatre.

Murray Kruger’s Business Day Part 2: Joburg Art Fair.

Murray Kruger posing as a businessman-cum office employee

Kruger is one of the most principled and brightest performance artists, which in some ways has proved something of a burden; he can talk his way out of a work, quicker than he can into one. In this 4-day performance Kruger came to terms with and articulated what it is to perform and not to perform as he moved from posing as a businessman (the anti- or non-artist) to immersing in an intimate and personal “performance” of a different kind.

Ruga's Future White Women of Azania

Athi-Patra Ruga’s The Future White Women of Azania: Live Art Festival Cape Town.
Ruga finally has named his “balloon” character, after bringing it to life during the X-homes project in Hillbrow. The performance of this character in the shop window of his Cape Town studio saw it evolve into a being that embodies the function of clothing. It certainly builds on what Ruga has done before and hints at what is to come. - published in The Sunday Independent, January 13, 2013.

Rodan Kane Hart's Exploded Kaleidescope

Urbanisation typically “denotes a thickening of fields”, writes Abdumaliq Simone, a London-based sociologist, referring to this layered mishmash of diverse elements, the complex groups of bodies, landscapes, objects and technologies, that define cities. It’s such a convoluted reality that individuals and institutions are unable to form a sustained interaction with elements, or actors in the city, or such has been the prevailing thinking, says Simone. The more “thick” a field is, he proposes, the more definitions and classifications it attracts, causing the city to “turn into an object like a language”.

It’s all about creating legible representations of space. Viewing them as purely functional, serving the needs of particular identities, lifestyles and properties has been one approach to grasping these thick social fields.
Yet, Simone proposes engaging with the city outside of these languages, definitions and approaches; it’s in the gaps between elements. In particular, he is interested in how people determine and change the nature of the spaces, constantly improvising in order to survive. This is the approach he embraces when he tries to come to terms with the underlying patterns of Joburg’s inner-city.

“Coming to terms” with Joburg’s inner-city has become somewhat of a fetish activity. Sociologists, architects, photographers, writers and artists are fixated with untangling some of the threads that define the thickening social fields of downtown Joburg. It is the very “thickness” itself that seems to prove the attraction.

Peculiarly enough, the gallery setting has become one of the main places where these (visual) explorations of South Africa’s urban life are being displayed. These spaces are almost antithetical to this concern: they appear like non-spaces. With their white walls and clinical interiors, they exist outside of the urban framework, are detached from its dynamics.
“The history of gallery spaces is completely suppressed,” observes Rodan Kane Hart, when I visit him at the Nirox gallery at Arts on Main before he is due to open Structures, his first solo exhibition. Hart isn’t referring to Nirox but galleries in general.

A set of double doors opening out onto the street roots this gallery in the urban landscape, though there is a clear separation between this pristine, vacant space and the seemingly chaotic, cluttered world outside.
Ideally, and perhaps eventually, Hart’s bold black steel sculptures will be displayed in public
spaces. Conceptually, this is his end-goal, though the allure of commercial success might shift the young twenty-something artist on another course.

His sculptures are largely simplistic forms; black painted steel rods configured into squares, triangles and more complex structures such as Exploded Kaleidoscope, an enlarged yet truncated section of a kaleidoscope on wheels. They are conceived as frames through which to view the city, though their design is derived from architectural motifs Hart identified, through photographs, drawings and observations of both Joburg – where he grew up – and Cape Town, where he now resides. They are mostly – except for Exploded Kaleidoscope – reduced forms that wouldn’t conceivably interfere too much with an urban vista, though in making space a visible unit open to distortion they might conceivably draw the viewer’s attention to the dynamics of space – the “thickness” of relations attached to it.

Inside a gallery they don’t function as a lens through which to view the world but function as independent forms – there is nothing else to see in the gallery. Subsequently, the sculptures’ relationship to architecture is emphasised and they function as a shorthand of the essential character of South Africa’s major urban metropolises. It’s an unseen quality. As the title of the show suggests, the sleek black lines that define his sculptures are the structures, existing beneath the structures. They are the framework, though Hart has in mind that they are optical frames too. From this point of view, architecture isn’t just the bricks and mortar of the city, the substance, but becomes the lens through which urban life, cities, are experienced.

Hart's Shape-Shapes

His fixation with optics is most obviously visualised in Exploded Kaleidoscope. The elaborate details – the interior of the circular structure is lined with raised mirror panels – serve as a distraction, turning the gaze inward. Without a subject, it’s function as an optical device is nullified. This idea echoes in other works such as Structured Twist, conjoined triangles and Shape-Shapes, made of contorted square shapes. The lines of both the structures don’t terminate, they are caught in a never-ending loop so that the work folds into itself. In this way, the design doesn't guide the viewer’s gaze outside of the work.

Not that one is left wanting; these structures are indeed very seductive forms. Hart may have unearthed the underlying patterns of our urban landscape, but he has maintained tight control of the process, has aestheticised it. It’s this level of control that perhaps explains the very rational, harmonious and picturesque quality of Hart’s works; they are beautiful and arranged. In other words they are quite self-consciously structured.

The palimpsest of the “thickened social fields” of the city has been neutralised, superficially suspended, as is the case with the gallery itself. The sculptures are like designer items. They appear visually and ideologically resolved. So there seems to be a disjuncture between the final products and their origin. They are pure surface objects, being advanced as having links to an underlying reality. In this way Hart assumes to have his cake and eat it.

However, his work adds a refreshing twist to representations of urban space. For starters, he isn’t interested in specifics. Hart intends to free the viewer up from being locked into actual spaces. In line with this desire to be liberated from ingrained narratives, he plays with the architectural phrases he has isolated.
His sculptures generate optical illusions – the solid steel rods appear to bend and move, depending from which vantage point you observe them – suggesting flexibility and pliability. Hart is playing with architectural forms. In the Emerging Illusionistic Bend, a slatted architectural phrase grows in scale as if it is being stretched like an elastic.

So, while he identifies a fundamental underlying urban form or pattern that seems unchangeable, he aims to warp, distort and play with it, exposing its malleability. Hart may privilege looking, by setting up the structures to facilitate it, but he directs our attention to the distorted frames through which urbanity is viewed. It’s not about what you see but how you look.

Faith 47's Heritage

As a graffiti artist interested in leaving fleeting work on city walls, the white cube is also not the ideal setting for Cape Town-based Faith 47’s work. She’s an embedded-artist; her work may reflect on the urban context but it doesn’t exist outside the “thickening field”. When this kind of work is shown in the white cube it is assigned different values and loses its relevance – and soul. Certainly, this is what occurred to many of the works on display at the now-defunct Afronova gallery in Braamfontein during the City of Gold, Urban Arts Festival last year. The graffiti artists who participated were delighted they were considered artists, but many acknowledged that their work was anaesthetised in the white cube.

In Fragments of a Burnt History at David Krut, Faith 47 attempts to circumvent this by colonising an entire wall of the small Parkwood gallery with one giant installation consisting of found, disused objects that range from signboards, chairs, a broken tea pot, candles, boxes filled with illustrations and corrugated iron. It’s an attempt to transplant “the street” into the gallery. This diverse collection could be read as an attempt to recreate the “thickening fields” that denote urbanisation though, of course, this is an impossibility because the field isn’t simply mapped through visual signs that can be moved elsewhere.

A conversion occurs to objects when they enter the gallery context that makes it impossible to reconstruct the street context here. In anticipation of this, Faith 47 frames objects that wouldn’t ordinarily be viewed as art objects; words scratched into wood, a torn advert. She has created some of these works, others look untouched by the artist. Her handiwork is so subtle, so fitting in a way, that you are never sure what kind, if any, intervention has been made to objects. She is a curator as much as she is an artist. Yet her representation of an urban reality is united by a binding aesthetic; these are degraded objects that hail from another era, derived from this “burnt history” referred to in the title of the show. Vorster’s image appears on an old stamp in the work They say Blood is heavier than Water, that is true?

Heritage presents layers of torn posters. The words “murder”, “rape” and “kill” are visible, though they have been damaged. Presumably, the frequency with which they have appeared has ensured their continued visibility. This is a damaged world where new pains have been written over the old ones. This is driven home in Awaiting, dated files with the names of cities, where presumably requests, applications of some kind, were stored. Along the bottom are recent hand drawings of men and women seated that Faith 47 has added. These “waiting” subjects are a recurring motif that feature in large painted works on brown paper.

The subjects are anonymous, they are the ubiquitous feature of the urban landscape; waiting on corners in parks – the unemployed, the destitute, the desperate. These are more conventional artworks but, completed on brown paper, Faith 47 she retains the ephemeral nature of her work.

She is interested in other kinds of throwaway objects, useless unattractive things in circulation. They are her canvases. Some framed objects have no value, it’s as if the frame itself no longer has any meaning. She scratches base comments about migration onto a worthless framed painting of a ship. As with Hart’s exhibition the nature of the frame is an underlying concern.

This approach, using existing canvases and leaving a mark on them, mirrors the mode of graffiti art making. Existing markings left on the objects are vital to her production. A lion motif is spray-painted onto a blackboard that once kept track of production in a factory. It’s an ironic twist; inserting this symbol of power into a context where individuals were subject to control. Driving this appropriation of dated items and inserting new comments or symbols is Faith 47’s way of overwriting the past, while ensuring it remains visible.

Time has elapsed; these objects are undeniably relics, however, they continue to carry some power, haunt her “waiting” subjects, who are paralysed by history. They are nothing like the ideal subjects of Simone’s study, who adapt urban spaces. They occupy public space as a way of asserting their presence though they cannot claim ownership of it.

A pedestrian corridor is given form at Interface 2012 at
Goethe -on-Main

Doung Anwar Jahangeer, founder of Dala, a creative collective that uses art and architecture to bring about social change in eThekwini, is interested in the people on the street determining urban design that suits them rather than adapting to it, as per Simone’s model. This is the underlying motive behind Interface 2012, a series of works instigated by five artists along a well-trodden pedestrian route through Cato Manor (Umkhumbane) to Durban’s Warrick Triangle. It’s an experiential project which, like Simone’s approach, is engineered to identify “gaps where time in our spatial composition is suspended”. By this they refer to walking, the habitual pedestrian routes that a community has established over time and the narratives associated with landmarks along it. These patterns will eventually feed into the urban design along this route. Like Faith 47, Jahangeer must also grapple with translating street activity and performances into the Goethe on Main gallery at Arts on Main.

The display in the gallery isn’t straight documentation; screens along one wall flash close-ups of pavements, and other paths along this route. It’s a jumble of sensory images; grass, rocks, concrete, all summoning the diverse range of elements that define this “thickened field”. Paths through the city are overlooked.
It is impossible to get any concrete sense of the performances in this project; the screens parade loose fragments. A cardboard installation that resembles a long-tailed dragon hangs in the middle of the gallery, illustrating the paths along the pedestrian corridor. In this way, the intangible act of walking is given form, can be traced, though it only plots one fragile line through an urban jungle. - published in The Sunday Independent, January 27, 2013.

Interface 2012 will show at Goethe on Main in Joburg until February 10. Fragments of a Burnt
History will show at David Krut, Joburg until February 9.

ID 5, 2013

It is unexpected and, perhaps, even disconcerting, to be confronted with a large collection of polaroids at Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s new exhibition, To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse, at the Goodman Gallery. This dated photographic product is so diminutive that you have to stand centimetres away from the images to view them. Not that this offers much satisfaction either; the images are split in two, blurred and dark, and the views of the natural vegetation that Broomberg and Chanarin have snapped are so partial that their subject matter – the Karoo landscape – is always beyond your grasp. It’s the worst kind of tease; knowing that something exists in front of you but you’re unable to access it.

This seems to fly in the face of the prevailing fashion of art photographs. They have been steadily growing in scale to conform to this idea that a photograph is more likely to be read as an art object if it large.
As the American art theorist Michael Fried has observed, this burgeoning scale has allowed the photographic image to be constructed – and read – like a painting; it’s absorptive, immersive and can accommodate details that prolong the act of looking.

Yet there is something painterly about this series; it is a visceral and abstract act of documentation driven by capturing the sensual details of the setting; the warm light, the textures of the plants. In some instances you are fleetingly rooted in the middle of a field of flowers.

This picturesque and pleasing veneer conceals, and is motivated by, an unusual political statement; an effort to reverse, invert the use of the ID-2 Polaroid camera and vintage film from the apartheid era.
The technology of this camera and film was developed to enable black people to be photographed – early colour film was only engineered to ably capture white skin. This actuality is illustrated via a display of test images of “Shirley”, a female model deemed to possess the ideal shade of whiteness upon which to identify the perfect amount of light needed to illuminate the body/subject.

The exhibition is peppered with a number of historical artefacts pertaining to the history that informs their project, establishing the gallery as a pseudo-museum space, while blurring the boundary between art object and historical document – it’s easy to mistake one for the other in this context.

Strip Test 4, 2012

The display of test shots of Shirley establishes the inherent bias built into photography; the way in which the technology ensured that black subjects were rendered invisible. The twosome present their own “strip tests” with black subjects. A black woman with white paint on her face and wearing a white towel is further “whitened” on a strip test; so, even though she appears to be trying to appear white, she is further “erased”.
Making the gradation of light visible in these images, the duo draw our attention to the constructedness of image-production, the unseen technological laws of light that predetermine not only how a subject is read but how this impacts on how they might view themselves.

Interestingly, when a better technology was developed to capture black subjects, the apartheid state was keen to harness it for the production of passbooks. In this way, the invisibility of black subjects was overturned only in an effort to catalogue and control them. Put plainly; this positive development was used by the South African government towards a sinister end. In typical fashion this transpired via a cloak-and-dagger scheme, in which the American manufacturers of Polaroid where revealed to be both co-conspirators and, eventually, strong detractors against the apartheid state.
Broomberg and Chanarin’s interest and emphasis on the inbuilt bias of dated photographic instruments directs our attention to the complicity that is forced upon its users, regardless of their point of view.
This puts a different spin on the lomography craze, the recent popularity among amateurs to collect and shoot with old analogue cameras. The duo seem to warn against a kind of thoughtless nostalgia for the old; these artefacts (as do all) come with intangible baggage, though in their own reappropriation of the medium, they are seeking out a way of overcoming it.

On a metaphorical level, the duo are quite obviously tackling the nature of racism; this inbuilt feature, a warped lens that perceives reality. As white South Africans they could be confronting their own unwitting complicity while trying to overturn it. Acknowledging that the “photographic eye” is inherently twisted is the first step.

The Polaroid series is an effort to unwrite a history and transcend the racism built into the|technology. In taking the snapshots of the Karoo with this twisted technology they challenge all the rules for its use; they don’t obey the recommended distance, or use “the booster” – the modification that allowed for extra light to capture the black subject. Most importantly, they refuse to apply it to black subjects. Is this a cop-out, in the sense that they aren’t overwriting the history but avoiding it, in a sort of trite and sentimental journey to meditate on the South African landscape? Can absolution and recovery be found in the land, which is not a depoliticised subject either?

Ultimately, perhaps the duo acknowledge that they - as white photographers - cannot “recover” black subjects from the grip of apartheid era-style representation. In doing so they may implicate themselves, as so many of their contemporaries – Pieter Hugo, Guy Tillim – have done. White African photographers’s work is inherently read in a particular way; the photographic eye is perceived to be overwritten by a biological and ideological one, determined by race, racism. So in a way it isn’t just the flaws in technology they must challenge.

Broomberg and Chanarin attempt to turn the lens inwards with an intimate and personal exploration of a natural world. It is their own release that they seek, their own identity they wish to overcome, all the while with an awareness that this can never be realised.- published in The Sunday Independent, February 03, 2013

The Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light shows at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg until February 16.

Athi-Patra Ruga heading towards Grahamstown in Performa Obscura

When we arrive at the Drill Hall, they’re already in their fishnet stockings and costumes, bending and stretching, as if readying themselves for something more taxing than a walk in heels through the city’s streets.
They have yet to wrap a string of balloons around their upper bodies and appear relaxed and at ease as onlookers, mostly children, observe their warm-up. Athi-Patra Ruga intended the preparations for his public procession to be transparent; his Facebook invitation encouraged an audience to observe this stage.
The journey will conclude at The Standard Bank art gallery on Frederick Street as part of the Making Way: Contemporary Art from SA and China exhibition. It’s tantamount to being privy to a rehearsal before watching a play, so it feels as if we are witnessing something we shouldn’t. This pre-performance ritual draws attention to the contrived nature of the performance and changes my relationship to it.
The balloon character that Ruga and his performers will become is now referred to as the “White Woman of Azania”. Its origin can be traced back to a nameless balloon character that Ruga initially conceived for an exhibition in The Netherlands in 2010, before showing it at X-Homes in Joburg that year.
The White Woman of Azania has grown in physical and conceptual dimensions. This Joburg performance boasts five “Azanians” and generates quite a different impact than the previous White Women of Azania installation/performance in Cape Town during Gipca’s Live Art Festival.

Like Ruga, I’ve become transfixed with this mutable character; each performance inspires new readings. It’s like chasing air in a way, which seems fitting given the costume consists of balloons. At the X-Homes performance, in a dark basement in Hillbrow, the character appeared to embody otherness. The Live Art performance/installation evoked a scene from Amsterdam’s red light district; as Ruga and Jade Paton tottered on heels in front of the window inside Ruga’s Cape Town studio. They were like guarded women whose identities had become over-determined by their contrived, temporary appearances. The performance was a drawn-out striptease that offered no pay-off: there was nothing to see behind the balloon façade when it was “popped”.

So perhaps it makes sense to start the next instalment seeing the performers unmasked, thus removing any expectation. Yet I can’t help feeling that something’s been lost; the mystery that props up the masquerade.
The multiple readings that this slippery White Woman of Azania character presents are dependent on the setting. In the context of Making Way: Contemporary Art from South Africa and China, curated by Ruth Simbao, the “journey” aspect to it is a predominant feature. The exhibition doesn’t simply present art from South Africa and China but, in an effort to create a link between the two, Simbao highlights a discourse around migration.

Some of the local works articulating that theme are expected; Dan Halter’s Space Invaders (2009), a video work showing china bags configured then reconfigured into the motif associated with that video game is transplanted at a busy taxi rank and James Webb’s There’s no place like Home (Johannesburg) (2006), photographs of Joubert Park during an installation where the calls of non-migratory Nigerian birds were broadcast from concealed speakers.

This motif is expanded via a Zimbabwe-African xenophobia sub-theme that is teased out through Gerald Machona’s Chewa Nyau (2005) and Dotun Makun’s portraits of Nigerian professionals working in South Africa. They are pictured against backgrounds of cheap china bags – this ubiquitous motif of African migration forms the most obvious link to China – this is the problem with setting out to show art from two different countries; you’re forced to identify links. Not that they are artificially conceived here; artists in South Africa have been delving into China’s influence in Africa.

Maelonn’s Amber series

Michael MacGarry, for example, has been exploring a form of complicit neocolonialism for some time. The works by Chinese artists in this show don’t “respond” to this narrative thread; rather, Simbao has selected works that mirror themes of migration and identity, notions around leadership, African and Chinese as articulated via Kudzanai Chiurai’s Black President (2009) and The Minister of Enterprise (2009) and Maelonn’s Amber series featuring young men mimicking/mocking the Chairman Mao posters displayed in a studio.
The addition of the latter art works into the mix overcomplicate this exhibition, which seems torn in too many directions. Simbao simply took too many detours in the journey of curating this show. The exhibition itself has been on a journey of sorts and has evolved since it opened at last year’s National Arts Festival in Grahamstown and now includes documents pertaining to the live performances attached to that iteration.

Ruga also embarked on a journey during that version, travelling from a nearby township in a precarious pair of heels before hugging a colonial monument in the centre of town, leaving a coloured residue from the burst balloons. The phrase “Purge your elders”, which was scrawled in neon paint inside the installation in Cape Town and appears frequently in Ruga’s Facebook posts associated with the work, could have been a fitting line to describe that act.

Doung Angwar Jahangeer's performance
entitled The Other Side with the Matabese Family

Doung Angwar Jahangeer’s performance, The Other Side with the Matabese Family, echoes Ruga’s finale, though it’s a less theatrical endeavour. Jahangeer’s site-specific work sees him covering the uncovered body parts of another colonial-era sculpture in Grahamstown with coloured paint – or earth in this instance, as per a Zulu initiation ritual. It’s dry documentary footage with Jahangeer explaining what he is doing. Footage of performances by Randolph Hartzenberg are also included in this Joburg show. Hartzenberg works with obvious symbols and symbolic acts; nailing a pair of trainers to a table, dragging a chair along a street and relocating this “office” to the middle of nowhere.

In this way, much of the performance work attached to this exhibition is absent and the viewers’ only access to it is via videos and photographs, engendering a distance from the live act. Texts around the gallery display quotes from Amelia Jones, which suggest that no live act can be fully experienced and thus the past cannot be fully known. These are supposed to justify this divide. It brings to mind Peggy Phelan’s assertion that performance defines itself through its disappearance. Nevertheless, as Phelan stated, the residue of performance (the documentation) is not a performance per se but a product of a different kind.

This idea is pertinent to this show, which among its many objectives also tries to address the nature of performance art, though inevitably, because of the limitations of a gallery exhibition, it can only ever display the remnants of it. In this way this objective can only fail. Simbao is cognisant of this, hence the Jones quotes on the walls, but perhaps she is too eager to embrace this inbuilt flaw. On the opening night, no official arrangements were in place to facilitate an art-going audience to witness Ruga’s procession – as one of my companions rightly pointed out there should have been a live feed to the gallery relaying his progression through the city. There is a sense that Simbao believes performance art achieves its objective only as an intangible practice without a designated audience, treating them as a superfluous entity.

Of course, at sunset Joburg’s inner city wasn’t short of viewers. As the troupe left the Drill Hall and gingerly stepped along the uneven pavements, they attracted heaps of excited onlookers, capturing the spectacle with their cellphone cameras. At first the mood is jubilant, with the schoolchildren from the Drill Hall in tow, and people smiling and laughing at the parade. There is a sort of carnival feel in the air, which seemed to conceal the darker motives underpinning this futuristic collective.

The name evokes a future generation rising from our current socio-political context; the marginalised and persecuted rising to claim their rightful place, putting their otherness on display in an effort to celebrate it, though, of course, this artificial balloon shell embodies superficial difference – it can be burst in an instant.
The ballooned troupe make for a striking scene, striding through the throng of commuters along Nugget Street. There is a touch of glamour and beauty to the picture, which proves seductive and intriguing. Passers-by are curious about the identity of the performers. In stilettos and fishnets they appear female – only one of them is.

Some men try to see what is underneath the balloons. The gender of the performers soon becomes the focus, particularly when one of the performers, unaccustomed to walking in high heels, straggles behind, “appearing like a defenceless impala caught by a lion”, observes a friend. His inability to walk in heels makes it clear he isn’t a woman and the more he struggles, the more attention is directed towards the fact that he is a man in drag. No one displays obvious intolerance, but there are mocking undertones to laughter and smiles.

Ruga and Co may be in bright costumes that make them stand out but the performance is non-confrontational. This is partly achieved by concealing their upper bodies, their identity. Because they cannot see their audience and vice versa, passers-by feel free to gaze endlessly, as if the subjects are not there. And in a way they aren’t.

As constant (and white) spectators, we unwittingly become part of the spectacle too, and questions about the nature of the performance are suitably directed to Murray Kruger, a performance artist. All these undertones, like the physical struggle of the journey itself, are lost on the audience waiting for Ruga inside the Standard Bank Gallery. Conversely, the finale will not be witnessed by the audience on the street, some have joined the procession, though they drop out blocks before the gallery.

It’s been a long journey across the city, a painful one for those unaccustomed to wearing heels. The gallery feels like a foreign context; the audience here have set expectations and Ruga and Co shift the register of the performance. Someone announces that “the entertainment has arrived” before Ruga and his ballooned performers invade the gallery, charging around it like trapped animals. It’s a frenzied performance that bears little relation to the mood during the walk. Here they are expected to “perform” and deliver “the entertainment” factor. It’s a cringe-inducing understanding of performance art. It feels like a farce as they burst their balloons in quick succession, streaking the floor with coloured powder. Some viewers are thrilled by the anarchic thrust, others are confused. Someone thinks the man who looks like a “wounded impala” is disabled and congratulate Ruga for embracing someone with disabilities.

This gallery conclusion doesn’t seem like a fitting end, particularly knowing Ruga’s disinterest in performing in a gallery space. The journey to the gallery is a performance of a journey. The trip doesn’t enhance the final performance.

It is the filmic works of performances that satisfy at this exhibition. That is, performance artists who take advantage of film – the main recording tool for this discipline – to make work such as Brent Meistre and Cha Qiuln, one of the Chinese artists.

A still from Chen Qiulin’s The Garden

Qiuln really exploits film; harnessing its function as a tool of documentation and the time loop that is specific to video work that goes on display. In Garden (2007) she appears to document the journey of two men travelling through a city with bouquets of flowers in vases. These colourful artificial flowers bring to mind Ruga’s colourful balloons, which also stood out against the grey inner city landscape.

Their destination appears to be a suite in a high-rise building where the men, holding the flowers, function as accessories in a ritual – it may be a scene from a famous opera – engineered for the pleasure of an affluent couple. But as the film doesn’t have a definitive conclusion, and it loops back to the beginning, they seem caught in this endless journey to arrive at this venue and fulfill a function. You begin to believe their purpose is simply to appear in public clutching the large vases – that this is the performance rather than the artificial one in the apartment. This brings into focus the futility of the physical journey – it has no end, and no substance in and of itself, though it can leave a trace, such as the worn paths through a grassy landscape captured in Jahangeer’s Indela (Path). Moving from one destination and another doesn’t necessarily mean progress has occurred. The journey between Drill Hall and the Standard Bank Gallery draws attention to the chasm between the population on the streets and in the gallery. This isn’t unexpected. Nevertheless, this isn’t the journey I’m interested in; I’m into longer adventures; tracking the subtle and not so subtle shifts in Ruga’s White Women of Azania. - published in The Sunday Independent, February 17, 2013.

Making Way shows at The Standard Bank Gallery in Joburg until March 28

I try to avoid being in the company of artists soon after the winner of an art award is announced. Unless they happen to be a recipient or previous recipient of an award they tend speak in expletives, break out in an angry rash or beat their chests with empty beer bottles. The female ones that is; I won't detail what their male counterparts do. It's not just professional jealousy that drives this post-award rage or even the twisted nature of the art-game, but a kind of deep-seated desire to be acknowledged to assuage that persistent doubt that their work is irrelevant, self-indulgent. Call it a Vincent-Van-Gogh complex if you will.

I'm acutely aware of this phenomenon, because many artists seem to believe that my work entails temporarily relieving them of this condition. A feature story, a review, particularly a short-lived text in a newspaper, is, however, just a quick-fix, a band aid - of the sort that goes soggy in the shower.

Nothing quite announces that you have arrived in this peculiar industry more than an award, even if in a previous fit of anger you questioned its credibility. As I say, no award is more credible than the one you have just earned.

Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of local ones left to enter. Spier Contemporary seems to have vanished, the Brett Kebble Art award went belly up soon before that of its patron and the Sasol Wax Award has also been scrapped.

What's left? The Standard Bank Award, the MTN New Contemporaries and the Absa L'Atelier. You can't actually enter the first two; you have to wait for their esteemed judges to notice what you have been doing and you have to snag at least one international showing or residency to look bankable.

The Absa L'Atelier award, which has been running since 1986, when Penny Siopis won, is different. You don't have to wait around to be selected; you have to enter to win. This means everyone gets a chance - hence many of the winners are complete unknowns. Certainly, I had not heard of Elrie Joubert, last year's winner.

What is also particularly attractive about this award is that the prize is engineered to develop your talent. Among landing a cash prize the winning artist bags a chance to study at the Cité Internationale Des Arts in Paris. The merit award winners get to go on residencies at either the Ampersand Foundation in New York or at the Sylt Foundation in Germany. There is also a fourth prize, sponsored by the French Embassy and Alliance Francaise.

The competition is held annually in partnership with SANAVA (South African National Association for the Visual Arts) and the closing date for entries for this year is fast approaching: 8 March is the deadline date. So, if you're under 35 and hanker for applause, a future swimming in a sea of red dots and confirmation that your obsession is meaningful to others then you should get your entry in pronto.

To find out more about submitting works of art for the competition visit www.absalatelier.co.za

*This blog post was sponsored by the Jupiter Drawing Room.

The Interview, Breitz (2012)

A black cloth hangs over the entrance to the Goodman Gallery, subtly announcing that Candice Breitz’s new exhibition will entail an immersive filmic experience. The blacked-out-white-cube engenders a different kind of detachment; of the type that occurs in cinemas where you temporarily forget where you are and who you are. What transpires on the screen, or screens in this case, overwrites the present, suspending you in a state of limbo, between the real and unreal, being there, and not being there.

Breitz’s filmic trilogy The Woods, the centrepiece of this show, explores this territory, though the Berlin-based South African artist is interested in how it manifests from the perspective of the actor. It’s not the actor’s on-stage performance she is concerned with, as she has done before, but his/her off-stage performances – contexts where they present their “real” selves to the camera, such as at an audition, press junket or interview. Further complicating this project Breitz doesn’t observe actual instances where these conversations might occur, but reconstructs them with child actors and two adult actors who have been typecast as child actors.

Before she became an internationally recognised artist, locally she gained notoriety for making work dealing with issues of race, gender and identity. In her controversial 1996 Rainbow series she spliced pornographic images of white women with ethnographic images of black women in traditional garb.
The series caused a stir. She was criticised for conflating or equating white female identity with that of black. It was a new democracy and Breitz was one of many artists questioning, imploding and challenging racial barriers inculcated via apartheid ideology - work dubbed as identity-themed art.

This exhibition very subtly links up with her old, supposedly politically-incorrect work. In The Woods film trilogy she appears still to be coming to grips with identity, how it’s constructed and influenced, and she also evinces an interest in the conditions in which two separate identities are able to flow into one another. In a way she is still splicing identities together. She is simply more sophisticated at doing it. Her subjects are no longer contrived, hybrid beings as her porno-traditional women were - they are real people.

In this study – her methodical and invasive approach has the feel of a 'study' – she attempts to isolate the moments of transformation – the point at which the child actor attempts to become other than himself/herself in an effort to mirror the adult actor. The line between the two is unclear. It’s this murkiness that Breitz aims to dig into, in an effort not only to understand the nature of performance itself, but the destruction of selfhood in the presence of a camera.

Destruction of the self is a theme that binds the trilogy of filmic works – The Audition, The Rehearsal and The Interview. As one of the young child stars in the footage shot in Mumbai observes: “I am depleting myself, there will be nothing left.” In this way Breitz directs attention to not only what has been appropriated, absorbed into the child’s persona as they “become adult”, but what has been erased to accommodate it. By using child actors in The Audition and The Rehearsal, Breitz is better able to show the transition, as the child self is so distinguishable from the adult self. Due to this the children can never fully become “the adult” role, so they are fixed between appearing like children and acting like adults. Their inability to fully inhabit the adult role, unwittingly serves to deride it.

In The Audition a group of child actors regurgitate advice about acting from a variety of sources, though they become so convincing you believe the dialogue is their own. There is something quite unsettling about observing children manipulating their identity. Aside from the notion that they have been coerced into it by their parents or other adults, there is a sense that their naivety, their innocence is lost in the process. Their authentic selves have been discarded. Although children are incredibly malleable, this makes them vulnerable. Children are as yet “unformed” too; they have not established who they are. This is what makes them ideal for this project.

Breitz reverses the model in the work dubbed The Interview, by presenting two adult stars, Chinedu Ikedieze and Osita Ikheme, whose physical stature has ensured they have been typecast as children in Nollywood blockbusters. Once again attention is drawn to the moment of transition; when they flip into child roles. As the two appear like children, their transformation isn’t visual; it’s intangible. Both actors battle to explain how this occurs or even why they are able to do it. It becomes clear that children are not experts in playing children because they cannot perform themselves – they don’t have enough awareness and struggle to deliver on a set to the degree that these two actors can. It demands a degree of skill to play “yourself”.

Since starring in the hit movie Aki na Ukwa, in which the two played brothers, they have become inseparable, choosing to live together and becoming alike – they say people can’t tell them apart. In this way their identities have “collapsed” into each other. This idea is further expressed through the dual-channel installation. Breitz extensively uses multiple channels throughout this trilogy, creating scenes where subjects complete each other’s sentences, engendering the sense that they are interchangeable.

The “character” is portrayed by a number of individuals, who each portray parts of him or her. In The Rehearsal for example, the Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan’s interview persona is refracted via six child actors. Ironically, while the actors deconstruct acting, how they do it, they become further enmeshed in the web of their own desire to project themselves beyond who they are.

An image from Kurgan's Joubert Park Series (2001)

The ordinary subjects depicted in Terry Kurgan’s photographs in the exhibition Public Art/Private Lives are also seeking to transcend their identity in the moment the camera clicks. Transcendence is an overriding theme in this mini-retrospective, which juxtaposes works revealing her intimate life and those projects engaging with public life that she has pioneered over the years.

Many SA artists’ practice is divided in this way – their own artistic concerns and their socially driven initiatives – though both streams eventually overlap. Kurgan’s isn’t immediately associated with identity-based art, though she is known for her photographic portraits. Certainly, the clear division in her practice has ramifications for notions of identity. Can works from these two domains be reconciled?

Her so-called private works are very intimate portraits, of the artist herself, posing nude with her child, and of her family history, such as the Dear Mom (1999) works, which presents letters between Kurgan and her mother paired with family photographs of the latter as a child. Kurgan raises significant questions in this communication, which exposes the fact that family photographs tend to conceal more than they reveal. Given this actuality, what function does the photographic image or portrait have vis-à-vis identity? It’s not just the subjects that project a fantasy, an ideal of the “happy family”, but the invisible “subject” behind the camera who collaborates with them to create a historical document.

Kurgan discredits the authenticity of the family photograph, though like Breitz she too uses children (her own) as subjects in an effort to perhaps extract and record the self-conscious actions of reconstituting the self for the pervasive gaze of a camera lens. Surely, the intimacy she shares with her subjects should erase some of the boundaries (between observer and subject)? Can this exercise be a measure of their intimacy? Perhaps it is one that fosters a kind of intimacy – or recognition.

Kurgan’s willingness to put her personal life, herself and her body, on display in some way counters or even justifies her intrusive gaze when she photographs individuals in the public sphere. It works at negating the power-play between viewer and subject, though in the images from a photo booth that was set up in the library in Yeoville for the Hotel Yeoville project, there is no one behind the camera. Not that this lessens this dynamic; Kurgan still has control over the end product. Yet, who is the invisible observer that shapes how they constitute their public image?

Kurgan is drawn to subjects she immediately identifies with: the mother who adjusts her child’s outfit as she prepares to pose for a photograph; the photographers who work in Joubert Park whom she snaps with cameras around their necks. It’s a form of self-interrogation, mirroring and identification, of the kind that perhaps Breitz sought out. Because her subjects are black and she is white, you immediately feel uncomfortable with the ethnographic slant to this project. And there is a sense that they cannot constitute a part of herself - is this informed by our own prejudice? Her unseen, unquantifiable identity constantly destabilises the images, or prompts questions. Perhaps this identity theme is inescapable for as long as the identity of the artist frames how we read his or her work.

Gratrix's Inner Boyfriend (2013)

Georgina Gratrix is part of a generation of artists who could be loosely described as hailing from the post-identity-art, post-apartheid era. The work they produce is post-political art. It's all post-post-post with this lot. They embrace whimsy and humour, qualities that found little traction when art had a serious social function. These elements are characteristics of Gratrix’s practice, but as it has largely been dominated by portraits, it remains tied to a discourse on identity. She works within the realm of the personal, though her characteristic dry titles and humour undercuts the intimacy and the perceived seriousness of the painted medium.

Her impasto oil-portraits are a product of her awareness of the complexity of her subjects – sometimes up to 30 different attempts are concealed beneath the surface. She is unable to settle on a single rendering of her subjects, which to some degree explains their grotesque appearance - she seems intent on showing what exists beneath the surface.

Inner boyfriend, a portrait on display at her Open Studio exhibition at Nirox, presents a woman with three sets of eyes. They hint at multiple selves, and the multiple windows into the soul, as the cliche goes.

Painting affords Gratrix what is denied to Breitz and Kurgan – the ability to extract the unseen features of her subjects, though through her witty titles and naive painting style she attempts to deny the appearance of “depth”. Perhaps it is an acknowledgement that she cannot penetrate the surface. The multiple eyes look out, rather than offering a view inside. As a painter or artist she is immured to the exterior (the visual) – hence the elaborate, almost sculptural surfaces of her paintings that emphasise the artifice of her renderings, such as the imitation diamond embedded in her subject’s earring.

From Pokroy's I collect Gingers

Anthea Pokroy’s I collect Gingers presents a flashback to the identity-era art of the late ’90s-early noughties in that it is a parody of the apartheid paradigm’s reliance on difference as a means of shoring up a collective identity. Here, identity is defined in relationship to a collective – or not belonging to one. As the title of the show suggests, the artist has accumulated a series of portraits of people with red hair. The title is at odds with the concept that Pokroy is advancing; that these subjects are part of a burgeoning ginger-dominated world, where people with this hair colour are prized, privileged. Instead it suggests that this “world” is only an obsession of Pokroy’s to affirm her own status as a redhead. Pokroy would have done well to have presented an enlarge portrait of herself. Is she not the invisible 'ginger' queen driving this imaginary community?

The clean unfettered presentation of her subjects recalls Roelof Van Wyk’s Young Afrikaner series, which in turn recalls some of Pieter Hugo’s early portraits. Dare one call it a trend in identity-photography – maybe all photography is preoccupied with the identity of the subject. Certainly, like Van Wyk, Pokroy is concerned with only one characteristic of her subjects, in this case the colour of their hair.

It’s a fairly flimsy characteristic to unite a population, which seeks to overturn its minority or persecuted status by adopting the dominant position. Pokroy relies on this superficiality to emphasise the absurdity of such gestures. This is hardly a new or interesting conclusion, which is lessened by the fact that the photographs and the show itself is not large enough to have any visual impact. Simply this exhibition does not live up to all the media hype Pokroy generated while “collecting” her ginger subjects. Her display of the classification scheme needed to be more thorough and obsessive - hair samples for example should have been included.

As the work by Breitz, Kurgan and Gratrix attests, art dealing with the nature of identity has matured and has developed beyond easy politically defined notions. Artists have finally moved beyond challenging simple physical indexes of race or gender, the superficial trappings of identity politics. - published in The Sunday Independent, March 03, 2013.

Breitz’s The Woods will show at the Goodman Gallery in Joburg until March 30. Kurgan’s Public Art/Private Lives will show at Gallery AOP until the end of March. Gratix’s Open Studio at Nirox Projects will close today.

South Africa will be participating in the Venice Biennale this year. In pursuit of a balanced analysis of the National Arts Festival’s organisers’ appointment as the curators of the 55th La Biennale di Venezia, I’ve decided to draw up a list of pros and cons to assess how beneficial this decision will be for the visual arts community;

Pros:

The organisers behind the NAF have a proven track record in terms of managing finances and implementing large events
Pather has proven to be visionary and a strong curator. Initiating new events - the Live Art Festival among driving a host of progressive and interesting colloquiums at Gipca - curating that event and Infecting the City in Cape Town.
With Pather on the team we can be certain that performance artists will be included
None of the team, nor the curators are affiliated to any commercial gallery, so no commercial agenda is likely to be served
As far as we can gather, their appointment followed from an ethical and fair procedure

Cons:

One of the defining aspects of the National Arts Festival has been the marginalisation of the visual arts coupled with an inability to curate the main or fringe programmes attached to that festival
As the judges of the Standard Bank Young Artist Awards the organisers have consistently played it safe. In other words their decisions thus far hasn’t shown them to be ‘plugged in’ to the contemporary art scene – they tend to acknowledge those who have already made a name for themselves
In their capacity as judges for the Standard Bank Young Artist for the visual arts they tend to select artists galleries are promoting, so they do indirectly advance commercial interests
Securing this appointment further cements the NAF team as gatekeepers to the arts; they decide which artists show at the annual event in Grahamstown, they decide who the next Standard Bank Young Artist should be, and now, have the power to determine how SA contemporary art is represented at Venice. It is never good for one group of individuals to wield this amount of authority
Aside from Pather none of the members of this team have a strong record curating visual arts exhibitions in this country or abroad

It is a warm summer’s evening and it couldn’t be an easier start. I’m lying flat on the grass in the Company’s Garden watching clouds floating across the sky. Metres away are Saxit, a foursome channeling contemporary South African jazz compositions through saxophones. The crowd languishing in this park parallel to Government Avenue in the centre of Cape Town grows as a slow trickle of newcomers joins the picturesque scene as the sun sets. We’re comfortable, relaxed.

The music, the performance, has temporarily grounded us to this space, binding an inhomogeneous group transfixed by this abstract language. There is nothing to understand, decode. One can just be. Perhaps this idyllic state shouldn’t be underestimated in a country where “public space” is so politically loaded and is constantly being renegotiated. Or maybe we are just languishing in a superficial condition, rooted in forgetfulness, though one of the tracks is about Nelson Mandela.

There are many mellifluous moments in this year’s Infecting the City (ITC) programme. Is this a positive reflection on this public arts festival that spans six days? “Infecting” seems to insinuate a more subversive interaction with the city, not simply an uncontested aggregation with the diverse spaces that define it. Perhaps the “infecting” appellation has become a misnomer since its inception six years ago. On its website the festival is described as an event “conceived to deliver provocative and novel site-specific performance art”.
Marcus Neustetter’s Erosion directly invokes the “infected” title. Clad in protective suits and eye gear, Neustetter and a team of helpers appear to be dealing with toxic material as they spill thousands of glow sticks on to the steps in front of the Iziko National Art Gallery. These garish artificial entities depend on the absence of light to be seen and consequently operate as some intangible parasite, infecting the space around us. It’s as if Neustetter and his team have managed to harness this invisible entity. En masse these glowing sticks make for a spectacular sight; he exploits our desire to grasp the intangible.

There are a few site-specific works, but largely the city functions as a backdrop to work rather than the element that is activating it. We walk from space to space around the inner city, mostly around the Company’s Garden and Church Square. It’s all familiar territory. Cape Town’s a well-adjusted city, or appears to be; we do not enter any no-go zones, we are never challenged, questions are never turned on us, as if we are an invisible entity. These short jaunts, strolls, are led by the curator Jay Pather. He introduces each work via a loudspeaker and regurgitates the bumpf in the programme before each performance. He’s quite embedded in the festival, becomes a feature of it.

We don’t travel by bus but we are on a tour, which immediately sets a voyeuristic slant to our status in the street, entrenching a boundary between us and them, them being the performers, the setting. This tour mode also underlines how the work has been packaged. Most often it comes down to practicalities; the performances aren’t linked thematically, they are strung together due to proximity. This cuts off the potential life that may exist between performances. Everything is read independently, making it difficult to get a handle on any predominant ideas. As such no clean thematics emerge.

Perhaps Pather had this in mind; public space is polyphonic; perhaps it shouldn’t be ordered. But we do need to name our experiences here. What name should we give them?
Explaining his motivation in the programme Pather hints at the most obvious dichotomous coupling attached to Cape Town: beauty and pain. Perhaps the musical works are being used to transport us to that place of beauty that eludes words. Or maybe they access the pain hidden behind this city’s pleasing natural beauty and quirky, fashionable facades.

The musical works provide a space of sorts and take us into old buildings – churches that have become invisible in Cape Town’s architectural bricolage. Inside these cold buildings we are temporarily transported, suspended by the celestial sounds of choirs, in works such as Neo Muyanga’s Thoriso le Morusu and the Cape Consort’s Shades of Grey that is drawn from medieval chants.

For Pather these are not musical interludes or phrases joining larger sentences that make up the festival, but an overlooked form vis-à-vis public art schemes. Or maybe he has a thing for choirs. Certainly, there is a sense that the choirs, like The New Teenagers Gospel Choir that perform in Isa Suarez’s Cycling Voices – they arrive on bicycles with messages scrawled on satin squares pinned to their backs – consist of members of the public. This puts a fresh spin on public art as one practised by the public. For the people, by the people. This is one way of involving the public in the festival.

Music is a particularly powerful tool in public space. On the weekend that ITC ends, the Cape Town Carnival fills the streets of Sea Point with thousands of people swaying to many different kinds of sounds, proving how easily music can dissolve barriers and unite people.
Can other art forms really mediate relations between the individual and the community, private and public spaces, when South Africans are largely so ignorant about the arts?
Compromises in these contexts need to be made; the art has to be (re)modelled into something that is easy to consume, is non-alienating. Researchers on the tour stop and quiz us after performances; was the work informative, entertaining or confusing? The question sheds light on how the festival organisers conceive of public art.

There are few works at ITC that read as products of artistic ambition – in other words, advance the aims of art. It appears as if many are chosen for the area they occupy between art and entertainment. This year’s incarnation of the festival seems designed as a bridge for those who don’t ordinarily patronise the arts to become more cultured. The public spaces and the free attendance are presumably seen as the incentives.
And it works. A throng encircles the troupe from Jazzart Dance Theatre Company when they perform Moving News in St George’s Mall. Resplendent in body stockings printed with newspaper brands and headlines, their bodies convulse to beats from speakers.

Some of the people in the audience have been following the ITC trail, others just happened to be passing along this paved shopping corridor on a Saturday morning.
One of the works is accompanied by a popular pop tune that a dancer lip-synchs to, so it is accessible. People in the audience are dancing to the track and one audience member breaks the fourth fall and gets down and jives with the dancers as if he is in a nightclub.
But this is a rarity; the barrier between the performers and the audience is maintained in these makeshift performance spaces. It is mostly enforced by the spectacles themselves – the bright costumes and exaggerated gestures and forms – that clearly demarcate the performance area, creating a barrier. The conventions of theatre, the music, costume, are therefore applied in these public spaces, turning each into a makeshift theatre, rather than tailoring performances to these outdoor settings. In this way there is a sense that the works are meant for a theatre and are simply being imposed on these public spaces.

It’s not a transgressive form of displacement, part of a deliberate intention, but one that is the result of logistics and practicality that hinder the works from living up to their full potential – that could be realised in a conventional theatre space. Such is the feeling with works such as The Widow by Mandisi Shindo, which takes place across the street from St George’s Cathedral. It has great potential and relates to the site; it is built around the ubiquitous RIP memorials that spring up on roads where people have lost their lives. So the work is grounded in public space but the histrionics, over-the-top costumes and stylised gestures and performance situate the performance outside of the context. In other words, the boundary between reality and fiction is hard and certain, and this enforces the boundary between the street, the reality of it and the relations between the audience and performers.

In Jinx 103 József Trefelli exploits the boundaries inherent to a makeshift stage, playing with the physical and cultural barricades. The performance space is marked out with red and white-striped barricade tape, and comes to operate as a sign for barriers between the performers themselves, whose cultural differences are gradually eroded through a dance where traditional dances from their native countries are combined into a sort of spontaneous gestural creole.

An overstated brand of performance is adopted by Mhlanguli George in Fourth Person in the Yard. Once again the work is about life on the street – in this case a family drama that plays out in a backyard – but a didactic dialogue and the high drama that defines this piece, which eventually evolves into an abstract work set in an abstract space, immediately disconnects it from the setting. These aren’t events that occur in the street.

Of course, we do not want to simply see street life replayed as it is, there have to be moments when the performances diverge and become self-reflexive. It’s a fine balance that few of the artists in this festival seem to understand. Rather, public art is interpreted as taking theatre to the streets, instead of allowing it to evolve seamlessly from it.
The drawback of this disjuncture between the works and the settings means they don’t prompt you to re-read the spaces where they are set; instead, the work ensures that you are divorced from the setting. This prompts you to question whether it is necessary for some of them to be presented in public.
Inclement weather brought Alfred Hinkel’s Seep on to a makeshift stage in the Spin Street Studio and it seemed unlikely that this had any impact on the performance, which felt rooted to the rural Namaqualand setting where it was conceived, though it dealt with themes that stretched far beyond that place.

This leads me to conclude that this festival, certainly its incarnation this year, might have more to do with introducing audiences on the street to performance in an effort to draw them into theatres. This is necessary; audiences that are exposed to these works, directly or indirectly, might not be familiar with theatre, dance or performance. But then the festival needs to be completely reconfigured to own this objective.
Some site-specific works just miss the mark. In/Apt: a contemporary Hanging by Shaun Acker had great potential; in threadbare clothing Gershwin Mias appeared like the homeless people who gravitate to an area between where the old slave lodge is located and the chambers of Parliament.
His body was looped around a rope suspended in this area but the presentation, the introduction to the work, didn’t allow him to emerge from that scene. A passing homeless man grumbled when he saw the performance.

Being, by Owen Manamela and Aeneas Wilder’s Under Construction were both set in and near the District Six Museum. Wilder’s Under Construction is a large temporary wooden structure that fills the double-volume room at the Homecoming Centre in Buitenkant Street. It is destroyed after its pain-staking construction, evoking the annihilation of District Six during the apartheid era. Being is a less straightforward work that through its own complicated staging on two different floors and the confused thematics around determinancy loses its potency.

ITC isn’t a programme to appease critics like myself. I realised early on in the festival that I am not the target audience. Too much of the work is light entertainment, and is unsatisfying for a seasoned artgoer, though I do wonder whether the tastes of audiences, the various publics, are being underestimated.
It is possible for artists to make work that can satisfy all audiences, and perhaps that is the highest goal of art. Mamela Nyamza’s Okuya Phantsi Kwempumlo (The Meal), which was performed under the towering skeletons of mammals in the Iziko Natural Museum, had broad appeal. In garish pink tutus, which fitted uneasily, Nyamza and Kirsty Ndawo showed the struggle to comply with the strictures of ballet, the language of colonialism imposed on the bodies of Africans.
As the duo tried to appropriate the moves of this classical form, they broke it down slowly, until it was unrecognisable and they were free, though not completely liberated. It was an amusing, bold and accessible work that didn’t need to be contextualised to be understood. It was at ease in the setting, echoing the politics that inform the conception of the museum.

You could argue that art is always for the public and is always site-specific in a way. What we need to rethink is what these terms mean in a festival that attempts to highlight these aspects. - published March 24.

Dissimulation (Tulips) (2012).

Since winning the Absa L'Atelier award in 2011 for a triptych dubbed Colour, Separation, Ian Grose became hot property. At the opening of Notes, a show presenting work from his residency at the Cité Internationale Des Arts in Paris at the Absa Gallery in Joburg earlier this year, his solo at the Stevenson was cited as further proof of his rapid ascendance.

The artworks seemed to contradict this; they were an underwhelming collection of small paintings of banal subjects - portraits of friends and Cape Town landmarks. While they were tagged as painterly "notes", underscoring that they weren't what the artist considered resolved works, they seemed to lack the charm of spontaneous disjointed ideas. I was left to conclude that the diminutive scale of the paintings had prompted the exhibition's title.

New Paintings, the title of his Stevenson show, may be bland but at least it's non-descriptiveness doesn't generate any expectations. Presumably, this wasn't the motivation; it is more likely the diverse mix of paintings aren't unified by any underlying ideas - unless you can find a way to link studies of folded fabric, flower still lifes and an imploding building.

Some of the paintings, however, evoke a sense of 'collapse' . This idea doesn't manifest in a predictable painterly sort of manner - through the deconstruction or abstraction of form - but is suggested through Grose's choice of subjects and how he isolates them. The studies of imploding buildings in the diptych titled The reconstruction of Pruitt-Igoe map the dissolution of a structure in an obvious way, though the title suggests that through his rendering of the well-documented implosion of this infamous urban housing project in the US, he is reversing the process. In other words, the act of representation is one of reconstitution. So it is that a famously non-existent building is rebuilt via a painting. The work brings to mind the video work Empire (2002) by Kendell Geers in which he replays the implosion of the Twin Towers - - also incidentally designed by the Japanese architect Minoru Yamasaki, who was responsible for the Pruitt-Igoe - backwards so that its annihilation is reversed.

In his treatment of folded fabrics, Grose adopts a reverse process. In his close-up studies of patterned materials the form of the subject matter, its structure, is suppressed or denied and the act of representation works at obviating, or collapsing the form. The renderings of mostly floral fabrics are decontextualised images; we do not know if they are the fabrics of a dress or a curtain or where they may be situated.
The floral motifs evoke a classic pattern that suggests a historical link, but as they remain perennial favourites, we cannot locate this formless object. The floral pattern could also be part of an effort to deconstruct, or maybe expand and repeat, a flower still life.

The works are thus meditations on pure surface. "I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues," reads a quote from Richard Avedon in the artist statement. The folds, creases in the fabric, impart depth to the patterned surfaces, allowing the fabrics to appear real.
An art historical canon is devoted to the rendering of folds in fabrics and their role in securing authenticity in the painting of the renaissance and baroque periods. Folds cannot be underestimated. In this work, however, there is a sense that they are like the glitches in a digital matrix that serve as a warning that this is a fabricated reality.

Nothing spells fabrication more than a study of fabric, which is fundamental to the encoding of dress and (cultural) identity. Grose, however, withholds the information that would allow this to be communicated. Instead, he guides the viewer towards the emptiness of the exterior symbols, to a place of nothingness. Perhaps this is why his paintings have left so many observers cold.

He is digging into an interesting area where the history of painting intersects with virtual reality in the digital sphere, and a revived interest in formalism. But these works are maybe only hesitant steps in that direction. He is undoubtedly a "good" painter in the sense that there is a satisfying quality in his brushstroke and his renderings are compelling (does that count any more?) but the surfaces of his paintings are not seductive enough to hold your attention for a prolonged period. His paintings need to be more immersive; larger, more detailed. That is if it is his intention to enter into a discourse on "the surface".
Ironically, I get the sense that he is a conceptualist trying on formalist clothing, in which case the surface only services ideas rather than being the end point. I'm not sure Grose has found what it is that he does - his defining signature.

Grose's work is more intriguing than Andrew Putter's Native Work, which makes a very straight-forward statement. It is an installation of photographs that juxtapose black subjects in their everyday wear with them appearing in "tribal" costume of the sort that Alfred Duggan-Cronin, the infamous British ethnographer, used to situate his then black subjects in an ahistorical Africa tailored for the European imagination. The installation overstates the constructedness of the "tribal African subject". The work also unwittingly implies that the contemporary black subjects remain tethered to the historical photographic fictions of Cronin's era; that they are haunted by their "tribal" (othered) selves, which Putter has materialised.

The black and white tribal images are the focal point of this small show, turning this aspect into the spectacle, while situating the images that bear "the truth" about their identities to the side as if it is peripheral. Putter may have intended to exorcise us of Duggan-Cronin's photographic legacy, but he replays it. The subjects may have had the 'freedom' to determine their 'tribal' appearance but it is within the constraints of a predetermined photographic project of someone else's making.

Schreuders' Rivals

Adding to the peculiar mix of works at Stevenson is another discrete body of work by Claudette Schreuders under the title Great Expectations.
The collection of new wooden sculptures are of liminal subjects caught between childhood and adulthood. Their foreshortened bodies suggest a child's frame but the swell of growing breasts and the apparent weight of adult concerns that have extinguished their carefree child spirits imply that they are adult beings. The artist statement asserts that the figures are a child's projection of their adult selves. They read in the opposite manner, appearing like adult selves trying to reimagine themselves as children.
The subjects are solemn, as if in acknowledgement of the impossibility of their return. The joins in the wood of the lifelike subjects appear like deeply rooted flaws that run through them and cannot be overcome, even by going back in time.- published in The Sunday Independent, March 31, 2013.

Christian Nerf working inside Goethe on Main
pic by: Brett Rubin

One Sunday, during the popular Arts On Main market at Maboneng, some visitors wandered into Goethe-on-Main looking for food. This wasn’t altogether surprising. With a large cardboard handwritten sign hanging at the entrance boasting the show’s title, Things are Odd, it appeared like a makeshift shop – an extension of the market. In a way, Christian Nerf was delighted that this misinterpretation occurred; he revels in rewriting the function of a gallery and blurring the boundaries between art and life.

It’s not quite an anarchic impulse, but more about transforming a space to suit his idiosyncratic needs. For Nerf galleries, rooms in suburban homes, even seats on an airplane or long-distance buses have become home to his itinerant studios. He treats these diverse settings equally, thereby undercutting the gallery’s status. They are not venues to exhibit work but to make work, a place for an artist to inhabit, rather than occupy fleetingly.

“The idea of arriving here putting some things up on the wall and walking out and leaving it was unthinkable,” he says. The gallery should be a living, breathing space, a place of action rather than (detached) meditation. This facilitates interaction, between Nerf and visitors, a rarity in the rarefied art setting. Whether this has enriched his practice is uncertain, but it has made for some unexpected exchanges with people unfamiliar with contemporary art.

A close up of one of Nerf's attempt to "draw with obstacles"
pic by Brett Rubin

For the duration of his show, Nerf spent his days in the gallery, making work, experimenting and reading – I spot a copy of Susan Sontag’s seminal On Photography on a shelf. On the occasions he worked through the night, he slept on a thin mattress in the corner of the gallery. This makeshift bed appears to be part of what could be termed an installation of sorts, though, of course, it has no meaning other than rooting the space as a living space rather than just a gallery. But because it is a gallery, a table populated by tubes of paint, brushes, and a beer bottle, everything in it is subject to the kind of scrutiny that may be undeserving given they are everyday objects. But there are other kinds of objects in the space that look as ordinary but aren’t – if you inspect them closely or become aware of their history. Like a torn vest hanging from a nail.
It’s a remnant from a phase when Nerf went out and “shot” fashion objects, not with a camera but with a weapon that would destroy the surface. There are also more recognisable art objects such as large white papers with colourful painted lines. They are not finished works, more like preparations for something, or just experiments in of themselves.

Above all, Things are Odd presents a window into the process of art making. As the title suggests, all things have the potential to be “odd”. Maybe this is the lens that artists bring to bear on “things”.
Nerf’s unconventional approach is “odd” in the sense that he has collapsed the space between the process of making work and showing work, which allows the former to become transparent.

For some time William Kentridge has been attempting to bring the activities in his studio into the public realm. Presumably this was prompted by constant queries about his working process as he become more and more famous. Ever the theatre-maker, he turned some of these public presentations into performances, most notably in the piece I am not me, The Horse is not Mine, which showed at the Market Theatre as part of the Refuse the Hour festival in 2011. In this production he “acted” himself, evoking a split self; the irrational character that responds viscerally during the art making process and the logical, analytical one that explains the work.

William Kentridge at the Baxter Theatre during the Rolex
Mentors and Protege Arts Initiative gathering

During an informal talk last weekend dubbed Getting Started at the Baxter Theatre as part of the Rolex Mentors and Protégé Arts Initiative, Kentridge referred to another divided self that manifests in the studio; the one half is deeply immersed in the work he is making, while the other embodies the critical eye – or the role of the critic – surveying his work from a more detached position. He illustrated this duality with a short film portraying two Kentridges; one was working on a drawing of a rhinoceros while the other stood behind him observing and judging the proportions.
There can be quite a disjuncture between what the artist perceives to be a success and what a detached observer might deem interesting.
“Often the works that I think are amazing people think are complete failures, what do I know?” observes Nerf, who has made peace with displaying everything he makes. Because he has ‘folded’ the studio into the gallery, everything he does is immediately on display. Like his recent “paintings around objects”, a process by which he is prevented from painting a straight line because of a physical impediment – a chair, table placed in front of the canvas – that shifts the line.
“It’s like life, you have to work with obstacles.”
Nerf doesn’t much care how these painterly experiments turn out. “It’s what I learn in the process that matters.”
Perhaps there is more at stake for Kentridge because of his international status, or how he conceives of the value of art as being defined by its end-product, but for him arriving at the point of making the first mark (for a drawing) can be quite a drawn-out process. It is one that he termed “productive procrastination: it’s about gathering the energy before making a mark”, he explained.
For writers, procrastination might involve making a trip to a nearby bar, quipped Wole Sokinya, the Nigerian author, during the final Rolex Mentors panel, Turning the World into Material.
“You have to work with or without a spark. You can’t wait for a divine spark to begin working, though you can’t force it either. The best thing to do is to engage the brain: read,” he advised, while keeping his own struggles private.

The best starting point for artists is to think about what is missing in public and artistic domains, proposed Peter Sellars, an American theatre practitioner who, like Soyinka and Kentridge, has served as a mentor for Rolex’s Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative.
“So much of what we see is vastly over-represented. Anger too can be the spark. Artists should transform anger into a solution.”

Kentridge views the studio as a place of transformation. He compared the process that occurs in this space to the way the world/reality is digested through a camera; material is gathered through one lens and something different is produced from it. In this way he views art “as a membrane that sits between you and world”. In other words, art is like a filter, a veil that can enhance, exaggerate or create distance between reality. This latter function became the focus of an exchange between Kentridge, Sellars, and Sokinya, in the final panel, Turning the World into Material.

The conversation was sparked after a screening of a short, but powerful animation of an atomised body, torn apart by a violent act. It formed part of Kentridge’s Ubu and the Truth Commission, a production that dealt with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) through the lens of an Alfred Jarry play. The puppets that featured in that production allowed for a kind of separation (from the real) that enabled catharsis, while evoking “the burlesque of the grotesque” said Kentridge.
“Art provides a strategy of distancing that helps us exorcise unbearable memories,” remarked Soyinka. Following on from this idea vis-à-vis the TRC, he suggested that reconciliation is impossible without restitution, a necessary act in “the archway of healing”. He believes that artists are ideally placed to create symbolic acts of restitution, which he distinguishes from “punishment”.
Soyinka’s suggestion that artists should be involved in creating symbolic acts of restitution resonated with Sellars, who usese theatre to concoct rituals to come to terms with unspeakable acts. These rituals|needn’t be large gestures, particularly when audiences have become desensitised to mass spectacles, proposed Sellars, referring to a ritual performed during his adaptation of Aeschylus’s Persians, where Martinus Miroto, a Javanese dancer and specialist in spirit possession, hosted the spirits of the thousands of Iraqi soldiers who died in agony on the infamous “highway of death” at the time of the Gulf War.

Nerf doesn’t deal with trauma or violence in his work, nor does he seek anything so grand as cleansing a society of issues weighing on their conscience. He is looking to bridge the gap between reality and art rather than enhance its separation, by using it as a mode of distancing. This is largely because Nerf doesn’t deal in trauma but in the ordinary vagaries of living and questioning how we live our lives. He does this by living an alternative life himself that is in full view in a gallery space.

By ‘folding’ the studio into the gallery, he not only blurs the line between art and life but work and life. This message echoes through most of the work in the gallery; like the large mindmap pinned to one wall where he has plotted out all the people he knew when he used to live in Joburg and how they are interconnected. It’s a sentimental act too; he often succumbs to nostalgia.

Part of the display on one wall consists of objects from his past; they are either artworks, like a video dubbed Elvis is Alive and in Joburg, a short film he made a while ago where he made Joburgers dress up as Elvis, or a small plastic bag with a styrofoam object that has been packaged and labelled “garbage” and has a bright orange price sticker on it, indicating that it sells for R30. Can art be garbage? Is art garbage? There are almost always moments when you look at Nerf’s “art” and wonder whether it’s all bullshit. These moments are pleasantly surprising, allowing the objects in the show to just be “things” rather than “art things” - his work almost always undermines what art should be; can a life well-lived be art?

Certainly, there seems little point in really focusing on individual objects, but rather the overall impression his installation generates. Because Nerf doesn’t dwell at the level that Kentridge, Soyinka and Sellars do, it’s easier to have doubts about what he does. If Nerf suddenly found world fame, his work would lose its uneasy status. In some ways it seems unlikely that this would occur, for the simple fact that he doesn’t appear to be driving towards creating resolved finished products.
“Everything is mid-flight,” he says with a grin. He’s maybe permanently caught in the phase that Kentridge so fondly calls “productive procrastination”. Through his short films and performances of his process, Kentridge is indirectly making art from this stage of procrastination – it’s a rich seam, where he admits that moments of failure become the seeds of success. During an informal exchange, Sellars confesses that his best works are those that have denied coherency.
“When something fails to come together, the work is about that failure. That is the most interesting work there is, though critics hate it.” - published in The Sunday Independent, April 14, 2012

Corrigall attended the Rolex Mentors and Protégé Arts Initiative at The Baxter Theatre in Cape Town as a guest of Rolex. Nerf will do a “working with obstacles” drawing in situ on Tuesday at 6pm at Housewarming, Atlantic House, Cape Town. It’s viewable by appointment until May 4; e-mail: atlantichuis@gmail.com

Crowd I

The images documenting the strikes and the tragedy that followed at Marikana were subject to an intense form of scrutiny. Initially this was for pragmatic reasons; via mediated photographic and filmed footage, supplemented and supported by textual accounts, that appeared in the mainstream press or the internet, the majority were able to grasp the tragic events that unfurled at the Lonmin mine near Rustenburg.
As we studied these images, and new images emerged that called into question the police’s conduct and ethics, our gaze intensified as we searched for new evidence or suppressed facts they might contain.
There was a sense that these images were clues to greater truths beyond the visual realm. This had something to do with the fact that the events were quickly read as symbolic not only of a growing discontent among an exploited and impoverished proletariat, but with Cyril Ramaphosa, aligned to Lonmin, the employers, it evoked the perceived betrayal of the struggle ideals by the country’s new elite.

Our ugly past reverberated through the police’s brutality and the violent actions of the miners. As we surveyed the scenes on this rural landscape, we were, are – the Marikana Commission of Inquiry has yet to be completed – transfixed by the possibility that they function as a window to our past, present and future.
In other words, our gaze is driven by a desire to see beyond, through and around what these images present.
Mary Wafer, more or less, attempts to perform this act in her exhibition Mine. Largely, Wafer works from existing representations documenting events around the massacre and the site itself, though it is stated that she visited it too, perhaps in an effort to reconcile the place with depictions of it.

Through painting she assumes to navigate or generate other kinds of visual representations, where the cold, hard facts, the straight edges of the journalistic mode, have been upturned in favour of a semi-abstract language. It is not complete abstraction; you can still identify the dark figures of the miners crowded together on the koppie in the Crowd series. In fact, in the monochromatic rendering titled Crowd I, the dark silhouettes of seated miners is the only motif on the canvas.

In this way the eponymous crowd of miners are not only the focus but, through them, a landscape is suggested – the rise of the koppie is read through their configuration. This works at fusing the land with the people in such a way that they seem inseparable, which obviously evokes all sorts of politics connected to the land that are inevitable in any rendering of our rural topography.

This may not have been Wafer’s intention but the result of her approach, which is not defined by abstraction per se but an oversimplification or reduction of the forms that presumably enables getting “inside” the image by paring it down to its essence. This requires jettisoning all the details and subverting the journalistic mode, which relies on and is rooted in the specifics. Her approach implies that the details can obscure the facts; the reality they represent can only be penetrated by looking beyond the surface and seeing what lies beneath it.
It is interesting that Wafer has assumed this approach – and this subject-matter. My experience of her work, which is admittedly limited, has led me to believe that she is interested in the details of the banal, overlooked scenes, though she seems to have always been compelled to reduce forms.

In some ways this has been the charm of her work; though she captures public, familiar settings – usually architectural or public infrastructural entities – there is a sense that intimate, personal narratives tied to her work are withheld… perhaps she simply creates the room for us to project our own histories.
With the paintings in this show, she reduces forms substantially and eschews the personal, the pedestrian, in favour of a monumental event we collectively “own”, so to speak.

Not that there is a sense of monumentality to these paintings; if you had no knowledge that they are linked to the events at Marikana, they could be perceived as nondescript semi-abstract landscapes.
Underplaying these scenes is, surprisingly, what makes them so powerful – and refreshing.

This approach has ensured that she doesn’t oversentimentalise or overdramatise the events at Marikana to the point that they read as the theatre of the abject – a trap that photographers almost always fall into.
As a result these images of Marikana do not facilitate a glib relationship with the subjects from a distance in the white cube in that awful bourgeois manner. In fact these images don’t make you feel uncomfortable in the least; you can look without the burden of voyeurism.

In this drive to get beyond the surface of the events (and their representations), she doesn’t want us to get caught up in the dynamics around identity and the obvious us/them dichotomies that are tied to this massacre.
And while she appears to be|directing us towards the underlying drivers underpinning Marikana and what they signify, it is not so much that she delivers us at a place where we suddenly have great insight into the mechanics, instead she confronts you with the conflicted emotional residue it elicits; an intense sense of horror and outrage and disconnection, detachment.

Aerial I

This may only be a consequence of close observation from a distance - a paradox in itself - through mediated channels. This idea is best illustrated by juxtaposing images from the Aerial and Rock series, that chart views of the site from above and the landscape from ground level respectively.

Paintings of the former embody the intense scrutiny the site was subject to, though paradoxically, this bird’s eye view can only be enjoyed from a distance from which the events can only be read in the abstract.
In this way the closer we study the events, the further from our understanding they become; not only are the complexities revealed and we are presented with conflicting truths, but the immediate texture, if you can call it that, has been obviated.

The Rock series facilitates a different encounter. In Rock III or Rock I, the canvas is almost completely filled, evoking a claustrophobic ambience. Black motifs, the rocks, appear to be tumbling, the mountain seems unstable. It is as if the landscape is shifting; it reads like a tsunami, a tall wave that will fold over everything. The landscape holds and withholds memories, tragedies; there will be no trace left of the Marikana massacre, barring a few inconsequential alterations, but the site is invisibly contaminated by it. This wave also evokes the heightened anxiety the event produced that may have been a consequence of the intense observation it was subject to and its over-determination as a “sign of the times”. - published in The Sunday Independent, April 28.

Mine is showing at the David Krut gallery in Parkview, Joburg, until May 18.

A self-portrait of Sekoto

It shouldn’t be the case, but of all the images that lingers it is a snapshot of the entrance of a pedestrian Parisian bar. You can’t see much of the interior; a faux wooden bar counter tapers off into a dark abyss. Gerard Sekoto stepped into that void almost daily, during his last days.
“He drank from 12 to 12,” observes Barabara Lindop matter-of-factly as she flashes the photograph in front of me, before flitting across to another glass case where other documents alluding to the complex puzzle that was Sekoto’s life are on display.

It is now under scrutiny again in Song for Sekoto, a centenary – he was born in 1913 – retrospective at the Wits Art Museum (Wam). This particular vision of Sekoto is guided by Lindop, a trustee of the Gerard Sekoto foundation, who has compiled the catalogue and the archival material, and Mary-Jane Darroll who curated the art.

The women may be united in their obsession with Sekoto but for each it is sustained by different perspectives; Lindop is concerned with the details of Sekoto’s life and Darroll the “aesthetics of his work”. The two embody the different points of view from which an artist’s legacy is deconstructed and, in the context of a large show such as this, reconstructed.

The picture of Sekoto that emerges from Song for Sekoto is a familiar one. There are no revelations. What sets this exhibition apart from the 1989 retrospective held at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (Jag) and the 2006 show at the Standard Bank Gallery, which concentrated on the Paris years, is that this is the most comprehensive with more than 200 of his key artworks on show; including some of the Paris works, and a sizeable collection of documents that haven’t been available to the public.

Predictably, the tale of Sekoto’s life that emerges from the documents and artworks has a tragic bite. In a journal article for Presence Africaine in 1957 he details the difficulties of becoming an artist in apartheid South Africa, where he was barred from access to formal art education. The hand-written draft is displayed inside a glass case in the gallery, yet the surrounding artworks from the most prolific or admired periods of his career – the Sophiatown period from 1938 to 1942 and the Eastwood period from 1945 to 1947 – suggest that despite the limitations the state placed on his life and career he flourished and excelled. This may be part of the romance of Sekoto’s oeuvre; though during these periods he documented township life, subtly commenting on living conditions in a ghetto environment, the magnificence of the works themselves transcends the confines of the settings.

In other words the works don’t appear to be products of the places from which they hail. Yet, of course, because the paintings from these destinations are aesthetically pleasing there is a sense that he unwittingly romanticises township life. For it is clear from the development and character of the paintings from this era that while Sekoto was driven by social issues, his subject matter was a vehicle for formal experimentation.

He was clearly playing with chiaroscuro in works such as Four Figures at a Table (1941-2), which shows four card players gathered around a candle that bathes the scene in warm tones that contrast with the dark areas untouched by its glow. For Darroll this painting, which echoes similar scenes that Cezanne and Caravaggio rendered, shows Sekoto’s awareness of art history. The restrained socio-political undertones are vital for her too.
“He wasn’t just this domestic interior painter,” she says.
Generally, the value of work from the apartheid years is measured against its political content. Sekoto wasn’t quite the protest artist, though after Sharpeville in 1960 he attempted a rendering of that horrific massacre from afar while living in Paris.

In his renderings of township conditions he didn’t relay strife and hardship through contorted or distorted bodies in the expressionist manner that Dumile Feni embraced – artists would only arrive at that approach much later and it is one that hasn’t completely avoided criticism. Police appear in a few of Sekoto’s paintings, most notably in The Roundup (1939), but they are not involved in violent skirmishes. Sekoto seems largely to be registering their presence rather than the impact it may have had.
The matter-of-factness that defines his work evokes the documentary photographer’s mode, though he obviously surrendered to the pleasures of painterly flourishes.

In places his mode recalls the texture and vibrancy of Van Gogh’s portraits of peasant life. From the South African historical perspective these ordinary scenes demonstrate how a skewed system was normalised. Life went on and wasn’t always interrupted or poisoned by apartheid. This seems to coincide with a more recent, though controversial, trend to embrace artworks made during the apartheid era, which capture the everyday. For some this signals a transcendence of that pervasive system, minor triumphs in an otherwise twisted context, while others believe this only serves to lessen the horror, trauma or impact of apartheid.

Sekoto’s approach restored dignity to his subjects, proposes Darroll. Aside from portraits, he tended to depict his subjects from afar and often from behind – they were always anonymous. Could he have been naming a collective condition? It is all supposition; the writings on display which are intended to allow the artist “to speak for himself” articulate his distress and anger about the political situation rather than to discuss the motives behind his work. Displaying them alongside each other leads viewers to infer that a political motive was in fact driving his work.

There is a common criticism that biographical material pertaining to a black artist is often privileged over the content of his or her work. In the mainstream press there is a tendency to do so in depicting all artists as a way of making art more accessible to the public; it is easy and more entertaining to meditate on a personality and a narrative peppered with amusing anecdotes than to come to grips with the conflicting and sometimes highfalutin aspects of art. So, predictably, the biographical material or aspect to Song for Sekoto is thought to be the main attraction.
“This isn’t an academic exercise, we want people to know about Sekoto,” remarks Lindop. She is bent on making the artist a household name, as if Sekoto is a cause.

Darroll is more connected to the formal qualities of the works, so she has to “keep reminding myself that this isn’t an aesthetic exercise; it is after all about a man’s life, which you can’t judge in the same way”. For her the work speaks about his life in ways that documents can’t.

Documents pertaining to his years in France, from 1947 until his death in 1993, are confined to the mezzanine level. Here his less endearing artworks are displayed. Darroll doesn’t consider them his best, aesthetically. It is not an opinion she alone holds; the works produced in South Africa before his departure in the late 1940s fetch much higher sums at auction. Well, now that is; in 1986 Sekoto’s Proud Father went under the hammer for R9 000. Works from this time now sell for R9 million, according to a catalogue postscript by art dealer Warren Siebrits. He suggests the dramatic shift in the value of his work had something to do with the first Sekoto exhibition at Jag in 1989, but in truth the exhibition was reflective of changing attitudes to art produced by black artists and the beginning of a drive to (re)claim the work that had been overlooked during the apartheid era.
This large retrospective suggests that Sekoto’s canonisation isn’t complete. The curators may be holding on to his status as an “overlooked artist” – it’s a romantic ideal, particularly where art is concerned. However, this designation is an easy fit for Sekoto who suffered because of his race in his country of birth and struggled to gain recognition in France. That Darroll and Lindop struggled to secure funding for the retrospective through local arts funding channels suggests that the artist continues to be overlooked - the exhibition and restoration of some of the artists' works was largely funded by Merrill Lynch, a subsidiary of Bank America. Paul Mashatile, the minister of Arts and Culture, only agreed to open the exhibition after Liza Essers, owner of the Goodman Gallery, put a call through to him and made a request, according to Darroll.

Sekoto’s outcast status seems to have been amplified in Paris.
“He had huge aims when he arrived there. But I think when he was there he wasn’t sure what kind of work to make,” observes Darroll. His lack of formal training made it difficult “to engage with his new environment” suggests Neville Dubow in a dated article in a glass case.
The works from this period show him to be experimenting in the modernist vein; reducing forms via a Europeanised conception of African abstraction. This is most notable in recurring portraits of an African woman’s bust rendered in blue tones, garnering the “blue head” sobriquet. In a way he was channelling Africa through the European gaze.
You could call this era his blue period. It also includes a striking drawing of a man lighting a cigarette, Homme fumant une cigarette (1988-93), defined by various azure shades. This stance is echoed in several drawings.
“He couldn’t get the pose right. He was struggling at this point,” suggests Lindop. This period was “blue” for other reasons too. Though it was self-imposed, he was exiled from his family, his country, and he painted less. In France he spent more time behind a piano, making a living as a musician. It was through this preoccupation that his weakness for booze developed. But it is possible too that the music, the heady nightlife he adopted, offered a respite from the crisis he was experiencing as an artist.
Paris didn’t deliver the dream he might have imagined. Or at least this is how his life story is packaged. This perspective gives a certain weight to the banality of the photograph of the Parisian bar, where Sekoto spent his last days. The place marks the nadir of a thrilling story arc, where Sekoto came so close to greatness – one display maps a tentative link to Rainer Maria Rilke, the Austrian poet, and Lindop is quick to mention that he swapped works with Picasso.
The art he produced in France may not have been gripping or in tune with what artists there were up to at the time, but that doesn’t necessarily mean his life had somehow failed. Despite her interest in Sekoto’s work rather than his life, Darroll draws attention to this fact. Yet there is a sense that the perceived failure that marked his Paris years is part of his appeal as an art icon; there is something more poignant about a tragedy – writers, the media revel in it – and certainly, it adds more value to the works he produced in South Africa. This may also account for the manner in which the downward spiral his life is thought to have taken isn’t hidden from view and is just as proudly advertised at this show. This seems out of sync with a determined effort to canonise him. Yet his perceived decline is always linked to forces outside of himself that were beyond his control. This could be the truth, but we will never know.
Song for Sekoto is showing at the Wits Art Museum until June 2

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Packaging a life: Gerard Sekoto