Kathryn Smith
FINE art
One comment by a visitor to Alan Alborough’s Standard Bank Young Artist exhibition reads: “Totally incomprehensible. Which is kinda nice in a chin-stroking, art diploma kinda way isn’t this image a bit too myopic in its area of attraction? It’s too inaccessible to revolutionise but not sensational enough to excite. And those ‘pod’ things do rather resemble hot cross buns.”
Another visitor found that “the square ones look like parking lots”. And another: “It’s like watching grass grow.”
The exhibition, currently completing its national tour at the Standard Bank Gallery in downtown Johannesburg, remains without a title. On entering the space, your path is mediated by a row of meticulously placed disc-shaped reflectors on the gallery carpet (when will they remove the hideous thing?).
Semi-darkness provides a theatrical setting for Alborough’s works, a collection of intensely laboured sculptural constructions, often lit from beneath and made from domestic and industrial plastics, dead batteries, corroded and oxidised elements, an infinite number of cable ties, and other bits and pieces.
Watching grass grow, or paint dry, is a meditative, boring, frustrating, pointless but ultimately rewarding act. You know the end result will deliver, but the process you need to endure to appreciate the product is anything but instant gratification.
Writing this, I feel quite desperate to avoid all the unconsidered things that are usually written about Alborough. He doesn’t say much about his work, as a rule. While many artists, in interview situations or in statements, overcompensate to the point of hyperbole, Alborough is (in)famous for his reticence, as well as for these Meccano-like forms you could easily build from the contents of your mother’s kitchen cupboard and the garage out back. Well, almost.
It is clear that Alborough takes an intense, if not controlled pleasure in his constructions. They are, by virtue of their existence, exercises in an exquisitely considered formalism. This should not mean that you disregard the material significance of his mad-scientist combinations.
Every single aspect of the very difficult gallery space has been co-opted as a conductor of sorts. His dome-like forms and rectangular vessels are arranged in perfect symmetry around the central well, with sheets of non-woven fibre screening off certain sections, treated with bio-mechanical corrosive stains or left plain, pegged and hung. Cable ties encircle columns, and reflectors (the placement of which has not managed to withstand the human traffic) demarcate spatial zones.
These objects lurk. And you can’t trust their stillness. Despite that, a relative quiet is needed for really engaging with these things. On a return visit, I watched a small boy crawling along the floor, totally mesmerised by this adult Lego. The gallery assistant insisted on trying to drag him towards the corrosion paintings, saying: “Look, there are pictures in these.”
So you’re left with trying to find similes where there really are only metaphors. His constructions wriggle further away from comparison the more you try to say they resemble something else simply because you need to name them to understand them. Or, judging from other comments by visitors, the need to understand the headspace that is required to make work like this.
In typically fastidious fashion, Alborough transcribes the visitors’ comments from each centre the show has visited on to his personal website. Instead of taking the conventional catalogue route for his award exhibition, he went multimedia and produced as coherent and comprehensive a document as I have seen online.
Having said all this, I’ve probably done precisely what I set out not to do, to talk about enigmas wrapped in mysteries. But this is where you begin to approach the impetus behind Alborough’s plastic-fantastic excursions. They are, as critic and artist Colin Richards has noted, “intimations of cool violence”. Violent in their transgression of objects that occupy otherwise very ordinary roles in our daily lives, and violent in what they conjure, as hibernating machines.
Alan Alborough’s exhibition is showing at the Standard Bank Gallery, corner of Frederick and Simmonds streets, Johannesburg, until May 26. Tel: (011) 636 4231.Visit his website at www.alanalborough.co.za.