/ 19 January 2012

Cape art picks: January 20 2012

Avant Car Guard's day-long exhibition closing party will be an experiment in organised chaos.

Visitors entering Avant Car Guard’s day-long exhibition closing party at the Blank Project’s Space will be forgiven for thinking they have arrived too late.

Relax, the pandemonium filling the gallery is not the aftermath of an epic bash — it is the actual exhibition. The work is a result of an extended residency that saw the collective, comprising Zander Blom, Jan-Henri Booyens, Michael Macgarry and Jaco van Schalkwyk, take time out from their solo careers to revisit their wayward youth. It is a typically bad-assed affair that uses humour, fragments of photography, sculpture, installation and painting. The installation
questions the relevance of avant-garde art.

More importantly, however, it is a truckload of fun. This is exactly what visitors can expect when Blom’s hard-rocking experimental band Jaco + Z-Dog hit the floor to bid farewell to the gallery in true Avant Car Guard style.

Blank Projects, 113-115 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock, on ­January 20. Tel: 072 1989 221. ­Website: blankprojects.com.

? Poet Danie Marais has won critical acclaim for his lengthy works that explore personal experience — using sound, visual images and texture — against historical, environmental and political backdrops.

It is precisely this unique combination of substance and essence that makes his work so strikingly ­resonant. In the group exhibition Tjorts! Cheers!, artists Marna Hattingh, Tina Jensen, Marlise Keith, John Murray and Liza Grobler enter into a conversation with a single unpublished poem by Marais. Themed around contemporary Cape Town, Tjorts! Cheers! is at once cosmopolitan yet intensely South African. A dynamic cross-­disciplinary exhibition, it moves from the intensely lyrical to the bitingly ­satirical. It brings to light sights, sounds and experiences of the city that might otherwise
have remained hidden.

Association for Visual Arts ­Gallery, 35 Church Street, until February 10. Tel: 021 424 7436. Website: ava.co.za.