There’s too much theory, too little skill on this year’s Martienssen Prize exhibition, argues IVOR POWELL
WHAT is to be said about the Wits University fine arts department’s Martienssen Prize Exhibition, which opened this week at the Gertrude Posel Gallery? Just that the most arresting piece on the exhibition in fact isn’t on it at all.
The work is a sculpture of two figures, half bone and half flesh, half human and half animal, hanging from sturdy chains in the stairwell. It was made by Jane Alexander when she was a student at Wits about 10 years ago, and happens to be hanging there because it is permanently installed in the gallery.
If I remember correctly, this work, or one very like it, was awarded the Martienssen Prize in its year. (There is no prize this year, by the way: the students rejected the concept some years ago, and now there is just the exhibition. As department head Professor Alan Crump noted, with genuine bewilderment, in his opening speech, it’s not easy to get students to accept money in these democratic days.)
The piece was made while Alexander was a student, just like those exhibiting on the current show. It thus provides a real point of comparison. And considered in these terms, the sculpture towers above the current work as a giraffe might tower over a mole.
The comparison is unfair: one cannot seriously expect student work of Alexander’s calibre every year. Even so, it shows up a real malaise; there is nothing on the exhibition, not a single piece from the few hundred undergraduate students in the department, that really made me pause.
This year’s Martienssen exhibition is, as one academic remarked, “the worst Wits student show in living
Why? I’m supposed to say this is not an easy question to answer. But, in fact, it is not hard to see why. The students are so drenched in theory and discourse and interruption and gender, and whatever it is that is considered profound and problematic in academic circles these days, that it is practically impossible to make art with any guts or passion or feeling or even humour. Or noticeable skill.
What you get is overhead projectors casting dim shadows on dim surfaces — thus enacting the spidery movements of discourse upon the febrile surface of consciousness.
You get (in nightmare imitation of the work of lecturer Penny Siopis) photostats blown up to the point where the image is unrecognisable, then transferred on to some meaningful material or other; this is considered deep in itself.
You get practically every black student on the block trying to redo Willie Bester’s Trojan Horse. You get lots of medical imagery, plenty of broken monuments. Only tragically rarely does anything that is either seen or felt or even thought glimmer through.
One piece, though throwaway in itself, did stop me in my tracks: the standard art history textbook, Helen Gardner’s Art through the Ages, suspended in green jelly. I could hardly agree more.