FINE ART: Ivor Powell
THE Johannesburg art world is in a condition which might be compared with a crisis in the stock market — where bullshit leads to bearishness. The centre of gravity has shifted; the game is no longer being played inside this country. Our art is increasingly perceived and marketed as an export commodity — the stuff of curated overseas shows and international dealerships.
As a result, the stuffing has gone out of the local art market and art environment. If you are not exhibiting in London or New York or Copenhagen or Dusseldorf, what is the point of exhibiting at all? Anyway, where would you exhibit, now that the Read Contemporary and Goodman galleries have closed?
Maybe it’s because of the prevailing gloom in the Johannesburg art world that The Scurvy Show looks so much like sunshine. Though the exhibition is certainly uneven, much of the work seems positively to light up with ideas, creative challenges and artistic urgencies. Of course, it is not what it would have been (and was, by the account of people who saw it there) as first presented in Cape Town’s VOC Castle. By the same token, though, it is testimony to the durability and internal and (dare I say it?) formal coherence of the work that it still makes sense in the more neutral environment of the Newtown Galleries.
Not that it is uniformly good. Barend de Wet — after showing his remarkable see-through, sculpted self- portrait in the original exhibition — has chosen instead to exhibit work that gives every appearance of having been put together as mild hangover therapy. Wayne Barker’s installation pieces, though they have elements that might have worked in the Castle, don’t do much to hold the attention in the white-walled gallery. And Kate Gottgens’ work, paintings and Mandela faces in metal, fail to generate enough internal tension to be even mildly interesting.
The other four, though, give off enough creative energy to carry the show. One is Brett Murray, whose drawings in sheet metal bring together — in iconic collision — stereotypical images of the romanticised tribal African with the semantic minimalism of an empty mirror or picture frame, a smiley face, Bart Simpson, the logos of South African banking operations.
Another is Andrew Putter, who exhibits, among other pieces, a series of small, mixed-media works, some with found objects fixed in resin, others including sculpted details, which stand in powerful and evocative relation to short texts, such as “female circumcision” and “addiction”. The exercise is as obsessive as it is closely focused, a lesson in how to convey ideas through objects.
Though the medium and approach are very different, a similar sureness of touch and intention informs the best works by Lisa Brice. These are big, padded emblems, made of linoleum and other synthetic materials, framed in the silhouette of the Cape Town Castle. In their brutal banality — one incorporates an image of hands holding a gun, another the silhouettes of comic-book soldiers — and mundanity of the materials, they become metonymic of white paranoia and
But the star of the show is undoubtedly the sculptor Kevin Brand. Brand’s Here 17 represents the ruling consortium of the old Dutch East India Company as the shells of plump, wide-eyed child figures, somewhat like the Oros Man, malevolent in proportion to their innocence. The figures are made from a high-quality papier m%che which only allows the shallowest of shadows, the blandest of surfaces; they are dismembered and strewn on slatted frames on the floor of the gallery. The effect is disquieting, the rendering of the subject both unexpected and telling. The presence of these innocent demons, both victims and aggressors, is epiphanous and memorable.
It is almost impossible to say why: the solution is as eccentric as it is striking, as intuitively accessible but intellectually elusive as a cubist distortion in a good Picasso, or a play-off of brushmarks. It’s the kind of thing that happens when art is made, and that’s all that needs to be said.
Not that it just happens by itself. Across the road, at the Market’s Rembrandt van Rijn Gallery, is Brand’s solo exhibition, entitled Make Mark Here. It’s a very different kind of thing: where the Here 17 piece is all realisation, this is all process — and messy, difficult process at that. Brand has started off with objects of cultural exchange, abstracted from such objects as trade beads. Then he has deconstructed them through scale changes and worked them in different materials.
In one series he has explored the forms on a large scale in concatenations of planks; in a second he has taken wooden cores and built mosaics of glass around them; in a third, the forms have evolved into something else again in relatively small, coloured ceramic pieces. In a way, what Brand has done is like creating intellectual driftwood from cultural artefacts, delving inside the structure and surface of the object, weathering and distorting it, subjecting it to a sea
The result is a series of works that are unbeautiful and definitely recondite, but nevertheless possess gravitas. They are like archaeological finds from an alien culture, repositories of messages not yet
Somewhere between Brand’s pieces on the two different exhibitions lies a moral that is pertinent to a Johannesburg art world caught up in a crisis of self- doubt: art happens in the process of making, not in the buying and selling. And in The Scurvy Show lies another message, too: the original exhibition in the Castle was generated by the artists themselves, without the involvement of galleries or dealerships. Jo’burg artists could chew on that while they ride out the
The Scurvy Show runs at the Newtown Galleries at the Market Precinct until September 17; Brand’s solo show, at the Market’s Rembrandt van Rijn Gallery, closes on September 2