Review of the week
Brenda Atkinson
There are several possible responses to turn-of-the-century ennui, most of which involve an element of exhausted backlash and sudden nostalgia for other, better times and simpler cultural manifestations.
I, for one, am aware of a growing yearning for time-honoured and outdated rituals like thought, beauty and big-band ballroom dancing. Films disappoint me, e-mail harasses me, and Johannesburg nightlife leaves me with a hollowness harnessed to excruciating millennial tension.
Sometimes, I wonder if I haven’t turned into Darryl Accone.
My thoughts and feelings about contemporary art are no different, really. Having fiercely defended installation/conceptual/site-specific
art to friends and family for years, I now long to be seduced by lush brush strokes on artfully framed canvasses. The other day, I almost visited the Everard Read Gallery.
Ironically enough, it was a double- bill featuring Wayne Barker and Ian Waldeck at the ambitiously titled Millennium Gallery in Pretoria that saved me from scrawling “Beauty is Truth” on the Star Graffitti Wall on Jan Smuts Avenue in Johannesburg.
Not too long ago, art critic Dave Hickey pronounced at a panel discussion on contemporary art that beauty would be “the issue of the Nineties”. Roy Exley, another critic, has observed that in the Nineties, the presence of beauty is also widely perceived as “death to the work of art”.
What the Millennium Gallery exhibition suggests is that it doesn’t have to be.
Beauty is of course not an essential, objectively recognisable phenomenon; it is subjective, even instinctive, and in line with cultural experiences and sensibilities. As Exley notes, it is its reinvention and redefinition in contemporary art that can both mobilise and subvert elitist notions of beauty successfully.
In their respective shows, both Barker and Waldeck combine irony with beauty to deliver concise social commentary: their works seem to satisfy a nostalgic longing for beauty even as they criticise the standards that might be applied.
The star piece of Waldeck’s Body Composition is the title work, which consists of a row of glass jars, lined up from biggest to smallest. In each jar Waldeck has placed the exact proportion of a particular substance that is found in a 76kg human body: carbon, water, mercury, gold, arsenic, and so on feature in an exquisite array of delicately balanced elements.
In an art historical moment when the visceral crudeness of the body is compulsively represented in increasingly controversial works, Waldeck’s work both refuses predictable shock value and takes contemporary art’s fetishisation of body parts to its logical extreme. The “body beautiful” is depicted, appropriately enough, with Victorian attention to detail and late-Nineties know-how.
Waldeck’s Exposure series of framed canvas cloths similarly plays on the idea of the beauty of the absent event. The clean cloths are “exposed” to various environments for different periods of time: 12 minutes on the maternity bed, four hours on the printer’s table and so on. The resulting “paintings” hint at process and labour of vastly different kinds. By being beautiful, they empty out a contrived notion of abstract beauty.
Barker’s All Washed Up in Pretoria takes an overtly witty sideswipe at white post-colonial hankerings for colonial culture, politics and aesthetics.
Barker’s works, while they speak to all South Africans, hook 30-something whites in particular. In South African Diary, a series of 10 framed collage works, Barker combines found objects that are iconographic of a certain time in suburban white South Africa: Weetbix tins, a primary school project, paper doll clothes and landscape images are combined and set in wax with ravishing aesthetic impact.
As with Beachcomber – a wall-mounted wax cast of a small boat with a comb in it – and All Washed Up in Africa – a similar cast with a black bath plug in it – Barker takes the piss out of white disillusionment with turn-of- the-century South Africa.
The beauty of these art objects imaginatively subverts our relationship to their political content, and engages us in the conscious enactment of our own – largely aesthetic – nostalgia.
The Millennium Gallery, 75 George Storrar Drive, Groenkloof, Pretoria. Wayne Barker: All Washed Up in Pretoria. Ian Waldeck: Body Composition. Exhibition ends October 23.