FINE ART: Hazel Friedman
AT the opening of the Wits Technikon Students’ Exhibition at the Market’s Rembrandt Gallery, several guests hovered around a table laden with brown paper bags — neatly arranged and filled with popcorn — not knowing whether to acknowledge the “installation” with their eyes or their mouths. Given the nature of most of the works on display, the confusion — at least for the uninitiated — was not entirely unexpected.
Primarily sculptural in origin and conceptual in strategy, this show is vastly different from previous technikon final-year shows. The emphasis is clearly on understatement, with students attempting to stretch creative parameters through a variety of media, unconstrained by commercial concerns. This, after all, is what a student show should be
As the name suggests, the technikon’s fine- arts department has traditionally functioned more in relation to the practical nuts and bolts of art-making than the theoretical imperatives that drive it. But with the recent influx of Wits-educated lecturers — renowned artists in their own right — the swing has been towards a more theoretically oriented approach, with students attempting to question the discourses of art history through a chain of references that cannot be unravelled through traditional art language.
That’s the good part. The dodgy part lies in the fact that the tech students are making similar mistakes to those of their university counterparts. At first sight the work on this show certainly looks challenging and, for the most part, engaging. But many of the students have attached themselves to conceptual tailcoats, ignoring some of the basic rules of art-making in their eagerness to say big things about really big stuff. In short, they have placed the message above the medium.
In the portable gallery series, for example – — an innovative collaborative endeavour by two of the technikon’s most promising students, Brian Fanner and Pierre Terblanche — issues of packaging and presentation are explored without sufficient sensitivity to material, as is evident in their Brancusi-like metal-and-foam piece which is supposed to resemble bubble wrap, but doesn’t quite make it in texture or association.
The most self-contained and cohesive works on display are produced by Kim Lieberman. In a series of pieces combining aluminium, rubber, found and painted objects, she attempts to address the duality of carnal versus spiritual, head versus heart and male versus female. But even in these works, her efforts at semiotic deconstruction appear too self- consciously clever and at odds with the spiritual message she wishes to convey. This is particularly evident in her sensory deprivation tank, a monster of a work, whose external materiality belies the message of spirituality inside and speaks more of bondage than liberation.
There are also refreshingly unpretentious works on show. Although the essence of his art is sometimes obscured by too much extraneous decor, Robbie McCafferty’s beautifully executed etchings in layered frames attempt to explore different levels of reality; and Fillipo Calsioni’s plastic-bag paintings grapple bravely with the traditional premises on which much of modern art history is based, namely naturalism and illusionism. As for the stilts — executed by South Africa’s own Gilbert and George — this work must have been conceptualised with the critic in mind.
But there is the danger of students reducing ideas to trendy one-liners and recycled illustrations of tired formulae. These days, stretching the language of art is not merely fashionable; it has become downright obligatory. But even though art no longer asks the same questions nor offers the same solutions, one needs to understand the vocabulary before attempting to speak it, trash it or reinvent it.
The exhibition runs until December 20