Walking through Michael MacGarry’s exhibition, Endgame, feels like rummaging through the attic of an old, and possibly dangerous, eccentric. The space is small and completely dark. An eerie agglomeration of bones, glue and animal hair stands in the middle of the room, lit from beneath. Against two walls video installations flicker silently, like forgotten television sets late at night. Against a third, the short film Will to Power loops, every 14 minutes repeating the assassination of some political figure. Facing Will to Power is an enormous rifle, an M4, balanced precariously on a white lightbox, as if the gun, or its owner, were studying the death of the man in the film.
MacGarry is the 2010 Standard Bank Young Artist for Visual Art and Endgame, which shows at Grahamstown’s Monument Gallery, is his answer to the perfunctory exhibition required of all award-winners. The exhibition is about the structures of power and control that play out at different levels of life and art. Often MacGarry’s work focuses on political power in Africa, but what always hovers in the background is a glance at the systems of control that regulate the art world and the careers of individual artists.
He is very obviously aware of his position in the workings of the critical art scene and the local and international art markets. And he is frank about exploiting this position when it suits him: his extensive output of modified automatic rifles has been largely in response to commercial demand for these types of works, he revealed in an interview earlier this year. Money from the sales of these has gone towards financing the production of films, a long-standing priority for MacGarry.
His honesty about his motives and methods as an artist is echoed in his regular expositions of his own works in catalogues and on his website. Endgame‘s history, in the context of MacGarry’s own work and in the broader political and literary environment he dips into, are chronicled in an exhibition catalogue. With a little effort, even the most ignorant viewer can begin to understand works such as Insects Cannot Know Love, an abstracted sculpture made of urethane foam, hair and carved bones. The work, which features in Endgame, is based on an earlier found-object work titled The Revel Fox (2008), a repurposed clothes-drying rack. Insects Cannot Know Love is a “grotesque and corporeal requiem” to Revel Fox, a prominent South African architect. It also refers to MacGarry’s former conceptual mantra, “all theory, no practice”.
Once, not so long ago, MacGarry dogmatically resisted the production of material works of art. Now he is a master of materiality.
A work that needs less introduction than Insects Cannot Know Love is the short film Will to Power, which MacGarry completed with the help of his 2010 Standard Bank Young Artist award for Visual Art. In this film a young black female sniper, played by actress Lindiwe Matshikiza, climbs to the roof of a building holding the same M4 rifle displayed in the exhibition, and takes aim at a guarded politician strolling in a garden. The 14 minutes of the film are packed with close-up shots of the protagonist’s moist, sultry lips and her hands on the gun, and glimpses of her snug, gleaming black dress designed by Lisa Jaffe of fashion label Guillotine.
Will to Power is an enactment of French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s famous line: “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun,” a quote MacGarry cites, with slight modification, in his catalogue entry for Will to Power.
Shot on location in Johannesburg and at the Great Zimbabwe Ruins, the film invents a mythical African setting that is at once urban sprawl, untamed jungle and ancient ruin. Although Africa’s mythic constructs, particularly those about politics and empire, feature prominently in almost all of MacGarry’s prior work, in Endgame they are only tacitly there.
Endgame gives a partial view, however deliberate, of MacGarry’s artistic past and interfaces so closely with the catalogue, which was produced solely by MacGarry, that the two read as an inseparable pair. For example, the several thin black poles that run from floor to ceiling in the exhibition space are not part of the architecture, but a sculptural manifestation of a 1999 animation by MacGarry called The Healthy World of Primitive Building Methods. This work shows the interior of a Mies van der Rohe building, 860 Lake Shore Drive, being penetrated by drawn black lines. A discussion of this work appears on pages 10 and 11 of the catalogue, and without this the black poles in Endgame are inscrutable — unless one has seen MacGarry’s animation, and few have.
Whether audiences appreciate or even understand Endgame, one thing can be said about it with certainty: whatever Macgarry does, he does exceptionally well. His presentation is slick to the point that he even replaces standard label cards with tiny LCD screens adjacent to each work. All this comes as a relief in an art scene in which mediocre presentation seems so often to be permissible.