/ 4 November 2011

Disturbing discontent

Disturbing Discontent

It’s dark in the Standard Bank’s main gallery.

Walking up the steps into the circular room, it doesn’t appear to be fun, with just two works in the centre and only one lit from below. It reminds me of the old displays of African art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where glass-encased objects were softly spotlit in an otherwise heart of “darkness”. But we know appearances unfailingly deceive.

What is imperialism, and what are its consequences? Who are the elites, and where can we find them? What are their expressions of power and control? Where is the fetish and who is doing the fetishising? These are but a few questions that swirl around the beguiling practice that is Michael MacGarry’s.

They are interchangeable questions he shoots as much at China’s hunting for raw materials in Africa as at the artworld’s gatekeeping of its own celebrity.

Endgame
is the last stop of the national touring exhibition that comes from winning an annual award for an artist under 40.

In your face
MacGarry has responded to the Standard Bank Young Artist award with a body of work that is about the social mechanisms of complicity, deftly delivered with complexity and finesse, even if it appears so right in your face. The parodies cut hard, fast and clean, dissecting the component layers of political life with casual irreverence.

There is something menacing, perhaps even dangerous, about this work. Guns. Assassination. Bones. Animal hair. More guns. And an iconoclastic appetite for walking all over dead heroes.

Sometimes it’s not clear whether it’s the work that is disturbing, or the artist who is disturbed. But the first sign of disturbance is the typography used for the exhibition title — slightly out of register, in the broken form of a line through the middle of the font. It is a summary as much as a sign of the affective disturbance in these works. In a mash of dyslexias and dexterities, they disrupt assumptions about the relationship between text and context, between arming and disarming, between the gun and the gun in the gallery.

All theory, no practice. That was MacGarry’s early mantra, before he began making things. But now it’s all theory, all practice. Because, as the artist suggests, mimicking the great Goddard, all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. The films in this exhibition are sublime twists of this simple formula.

In his careless playfulness and unbounded wit, MacGarry is the darker Walter Battiss of our
contemporary times.

Intended pointlessness
The spaces of his films are often as isolated as those of Battiss’s Fook, but just a lot more deranged. And his interest and inventiveness regularly defaults to fantasy forms of the gun.

As with Battiss, don’t expect all of this to add up, because you’ll only get an error in the calculation.

You’ll miss the point of its intended pointlessness.

To quote the artist, you will struggle while I relax.

Endgame
is showing at the Standard Bank Gallery, corner Simmonds and Frederick streets, Johannesburg, until December 3. The gallery is open from Monday to Friday, 8am to 4.30pm, and on Saturday from 9am to 1pm. Admission is free. Tel: 011 631 4467.


Rory Bester is an art historian in the Wits School of Arts