FINE ART: Ivor Powell
A COUPLE of weeks ago I had some things that were not exactly brimming with goodwill to say about the kind of art exhibitions one encounters in the Christmas season. Well, it turns out I have to eat my words before I get to eat my turkey or brandy pudding.
Anything Boxed, the show running at the Goodman Gallery in Hyde Park, is not, let me hasten to say, the best exhibition I have seen all year. Some of the commissioned boxes are pretty throwaway items; many find the artist working in what-the-hell mode, in media that he or she is ill-equipped to control, and end up looking uncomfortably like the occasional pieces they are.
Still, there is a cohesion to this exhibition — range though it might from Eduardo Villa to Kendell Geers — and, for at least some of the artists, the brief and open-ended metaphor of the box have served as creative grist, evoking some very focused artistic responses with often very minimal materials.
Notable among these is Tony Nkotsi, who has produced a physically grubby little work which nevertheless has clean and sweeping intellectual lines.
Entitled Little James in His Little Big Room in Sandton, the piece is in the form of an eccentrically contructed cube, with its open face towards the viewer. Inside is a stone, shaped vaguely like a head and constrained by bits of twisted wire. This is James, and James’ mental state is further cued in by a dangerous little triangle of found metal protruding inwards.
James’ Room is a little work, to be sure, but it is assured and sufficiently successful to recall without embarrassment other treatments of similar themes by such artists as Magritte and Giacometti.
Then there is Kendell Geers’ Shoebox 1988-94 which features a taped-up Doc Martens shoebox with a blow-up of a newspaper article on one face. It reads: “The body of a newborn girl was found in a shoebox hidden in a manhole in Malvern East …”
As Geers has learnt to do so well in recent years, it creates a conundrum out of the juxtaposition of the autobiographical reference contained in the shoebox and its dates (and in the possibility at least that something is inside it that the viewer is not privy to) with the public reference contained in the newspaper article. In the gesture a curious kind of interface of difficulty is created which Geers increasingly identifies as the sphere of his activity as an artist.
The box metaphor serves sculptor Isolde Krams equally well in her Latex Doll. It’s a sort of jill-in-the-box whose pudenda pop out at any viewer prepared to negotiate the horrid, flesh-like texture of the latex-covered box to lift the lid.
It is a corny enough idea and the kind of aggressively feminist gesture that usually snarls up in its own shock value, but Krams pulls it off simply by being a sculptor accomplished enough to take care of details like the texture and muted colouration of the latex on the box, the tonal values of the vagina, and so on.
The star of the show, though, is Penny Siopis, whose sensual intelligence seems finally and triumphantly to have reasserted itself after a long immersion in an aridly PC intellectualism.
Her From Cuba with Love is a black leather vanity case lined with red velvet and filled with little pebbles dyed in varying shades of red along with the words “with love” taken from a piece of kitschy teenage jewellery. On the lid is a little frame in the form of a red heart and, inside this, presented with appropriately reliquary devotion, a fragment of a fallen madonna face in relief.
Somewhere between religious icon and girlie shrine, the object has a touching intensity that languages not as afraid of feeling as English would designate with some word derived from “sentiment”.
Siopis has three or four pieces on the show. They all function in this same intuitive way, investing the ordinary with emotion, finding some species of the unashamed magic of the image that has bequeathed us a billion madonnas. And, to get back to the Christmas theme, I wouldn’t mind one for a present.
Anything Boxed closes on December 24