Neville Dubow
I SAW the Johannesburg Biennale at the end of its run. Deliberately so. I was curious to see how many of the installations would transcend their exhibition shelf-life and lodge themselves in one’s memory. And I’m not even going to mention all those dead video monitors and unlit candles.
As at all international expos/circuses based on the Venice Biennale model, the amount of trivia and ephemera far outnumbered the challenging stuff. Lots and lots of crushed stone before you get to the gold. Plenty of re- invented wheels with an attempt at a local spin. And, of course, those pretentious, media-grabbing, creaking wheels with thinly-retreaded rationales.
But one expects all this. If one compares Africus ’95 with the 1993 Venice Biennale, the proportion of expo- routine to genuine revelatory experience is roughly the same.
Here is a short, subjective list of exhibits that challenged and moved me, gut and mind:
* Of the several works that dealt with memory haunted by history, two will stay with me for a long time. These were found in the Angolan and Israeli exhibits: Fernando Alvim’s darkened hecatomb of the Angolan war, and Simcha Shirmer’s evocation of the Holocaust, arguably the most difficult of all themes for an artist to engage with.
* On a completely different level — contemplative, timeless — Chinese artist Cai Guo Qiang created a magical space in a screened-off cubicle in the Electric Workshop, where horizontally-suspended wooden figures floated below incense tapers focused on body pressure points. In its own way, Karel Nel’s Temenos installation in a sunken room in the Johannesburg Art Gallery extended the experience of contemplative space — of art being bound to ancient mysteries.
But, above all, two installations continue to reverberate in one’s memory:
* The first is Willem Boshoff’s sculpture installation at the Johannesburg Art Gallery — Blind Alphabet ABC. This must surely be the obsessive, dedicated tour de force of the Biennale: 340 boxes, each containing a carved wooden object; tactile transcriptions of arcane dictionary definitions, hidden from view by Braille inscriptions. These are sculptures where mediation on the part of the unsighted is necessary for the sighted to access the work, literally to read it. One hears a lot about empowerment and reversed power relationships. This work achieves it, memorably.
* The other is, in a sense, more problematic, an act of inspired curatorial appropriation, generally so lacking in the Biennale: Ian Waldeck’s Prisoners’ Exhibit, recreated by the prisoners themselves, from the communal cells of Leeukop Prison. This is a work co-opted from a prison ritual that is encouraged by the authorities and practised in other jails. Prisoners compete to make up their beds before breakfast inspection — using no more than blankets, towels and bits of toilet paper. These materials, arte povera in the real sense of the term, have been pleated, twisted, folded, coaxed and cajoled into fantastical forms — as if a Gaudi roofscape in Barcelona had transmigrated and been reborn, soft and pliable, on a South African prison bed. It’s doubtful whether the authors of these astonishing works were thinking of “art” when they made them; rather, they have to do with a process of humanising and proclaiming personal space, of saying: I am an individual. Which is, after all, the departure point of any creative impulse.
This question of co-option, appropriation and recontextualisation within the art arena is one of the enduring themes of the 20th century, going back to Marcel Duchamp, and endlessly extended. There is no problem with the principle if it is executed with enough sharpness, wit, or curatorial precision. In the case of the Waldeck installation, it works memorably.
The strongest component of the Body Politic show at the Gertrude Posel, interestingly enough, also embodies visual material brought in from outside the art arena. This is a film based on video footage of the Dobsonville protest in 1990 where black women used their own stripped bodies as a weapon to demand proper housing. The film, directed by Jay Maingard, was made as a social documentary by political scientists rather than artists. Intelligently edited, with recent interviews with the protagonists — what did they feel then? what do they think now? — it gave a cutting edge to an otherwise dispersed show.
I was thinking about this life/art transposition as I walked across the scruffy no-man’s land between the Electric Workshop and Museum Africa (a “cultural precinct” of infinite promise still waiting to happen). I looked into the old municipal compound now carefully restored by Alan Lipman into the new Worker’s Museum/Library. I was struck by the room given over to a restoration of workers’ sleeping arrangements — concrete bunks, suitcases, wooden boxes et al. How effectively this could be read as the kind of statement that operates in the famous gap between art and life.
If transferred, as an installation, to any of the art arenas — Electric Workshop or Museum Africa, it would have had the strength that many of the self-conscious art pieces in the same venues sadly lacked. But how would its meaning have changed? Would it have extra authority conferred upon it by being transposed into the sanctifying space of the art arena? Or would it have been diminished?
Which brings me to the most significant of the missed opportunities of the Biennale — the Electric Workshop, focal point of the whole show. The building itself, described in the Weekly Mail & Guardian by Ruth Sack last week, is a staggeringly rich space. What struck me was the failure of most of the installations in it to come to terms, let alone interact, with the extraordinary spatial possibilities it offers. The building operates as sculptural space in its own right. But there’s a paradox here. It’s more than a hard act to follow. It’s a hard act for any art installation to establish itself in, without being completely overwhelmed — unless the art work itself has got something powerful to say.
One wonders how many of the curators really understood the nature of this challenge. We all know that construction work was going on right up to the opening. But that’s one of the many lessons to be learnt for next time. It is essential to expose curators and artists to the demands and opportunities of the space with enough time to come up with site-specific installations that can be heightened and not diminished by their physical context.
Whatever form the next Biennale takes, it may be wise to consider these options: cut down on scale in favour of manageability. Show less but show it to better advantage. Insist on greater curatorial clarity. Present the South African contributions in a more coherent and comprehensive way so that we may get a clearer sense of where we have come from.
The quality of creative thinking to be drawn on from our artists is not in question. But there has to be a better way to get this across, not only to the international community, but to ourselves.Three rebels with a cause