FINE ART: Ivor Powell
WHAT we blithely and generally unreflectively call “art” — as though that made sense of it all — is a complicated, frequently opaque and often bizarre process.
“Art” is what makes a Van Gogh worth $50-million, or whatever it is that hard-headed business consortiums pay for the work of that artist today. It is what constitutes the essential difference between a Van Gogh and the kind of work that sells for a couple of hundred rands at Zoo Lake.
It is something that can involve nothing more than an artist shooting bullets at an aircraft flying overhead, or cutting off his penis, or rubbing out somebody else’s drawing.
It is also something that happens to objects, and something that happened to a whole batch of South African rural artists when they suddenly got promoted during the 1980s — and just as suddenly stopped making curios and began to be exhibited in upmarket galleries.
In short, it is not something that resides in the object. It is something that happens to the object (or to the act). It is some kind of measure of the way that the object or the act is used. It is a verb, maybe, rather than a noun — and, beyond that, much more of a question than an answer.
Basically it is this question that is asked in Art Works, the show curated by gallery director Stephen Hobbs and Porat Jacobson at the Market’s Rembrandt van Rijn Galleries.
What the two have done is, on one level, pretty simple. They have brought together a cross-section of art production in South Africa, grouped it in different ways and left it to ask its own questions, map out its own interrelationships.
The kind of landscapes you might buy at the OK Bazaars are placed alongside Penny Siopis paintings; a Peter Schutz sculpture of a table — complete with tablecloth creases carved in wood and two chairs bearing metonymic hats — is positioned in front of a small genre painting of three men, two blacks and a white, sharing a sociable shit; a collection of so-called transitional carvings is jumbled together in a curio shop display; a Brett Murray relief sculpture is placed against patterned wallpaper, and so on.
But the curators have gone beyond doing just this; they have also built up a number of other levels of ambiguity. Works by “name” artists have been tagged with the artist’s name, while the storebought variety have been left anonymous (even when signed). One wall has been papered with a selection of critical articles culled from the local press. And, in addition, the curators have “claimed” many of the displays by titling them and identifying them as works by Hobbs and Jacobson.
In short, they have tried to give an overview of the total process of local art production — or, as Jacobson described it before telling me I had to make it up myself from here on, a “salon” of South African art.
In particular, they have found ways of questioning and jeopardising the identity of the art object as the beginning and end of art production, and instead identified a whole milieu in which the object is created and recreated through exhibition, through the name and reputation of the artist, the process of criticism, through the differential meanings that are created through the decisions, the selections and the placements effected by the creator, and so on.
It is done with a certain amount of style. A particularly fine Robert Hodgins is hung carelessly on its side because it fits the wall better that way. A group of three Magic Circles is created from three pieces of sculpture (two dealing in conceptual ways with the issue of the curio, the other a rolled-up drawing by Diane Victor). Each is surrounded by photostats from art publications — thus suggesting the process that alchemises the objects into art. In the layering of possible and real identities, a maze of meaning is created, a net of problems and ambiguities.
The viewer (who is not to be confused with the crowds who attend openings, who shall be referred to as “the drinker”) is left to sort it all out, or, at least, meditatively to register the ironies the curators have structured.
Certainly these ironies are worth registering. Even so, I can’t help feeling the curators stopped short of real engagement with the issues. Hobbs and Jacobson might have included a piece viewed in close-up, rather than the wide angle in which the exhibition as a whole is cast. For instance, a particular artwork seen in conjunction with various critical responses and changing interpretations, a record of the dealerships which have handled it, the prices for which it had been sold, the travelling exhibitions on which it had been included, and so on.
Or it might have been interesting to jumble the system, labelling some of the non-name artworks while leaving “real art” unacknowledged. Or, again, to have introduced found objects into the art system. This would have been to have made some kind of verb out of the noun that the exhibition remains.
The exhibition runs until February 2