Young and restless — or just dazed and confused? HAZEL FRIEDMAN reports on an exhibition by a group of Johannesburg conceptual artists
IT was one of those rare, ironic intersections between art and life which reveal the gulf between them. At the opening of The Young and the Restless Without Permission, at the Sandton Art Gallery, the normally pristine space became a site of struggle as the homeless from Alexandra Township invaded the civic centre to protest against housing delays.
They toyi-toyied past artworks comprising flimsy cardboard shacks, turd-shaped bundles of felt and fat, bits of masking tape displayed like entrails, dolls crudely constructed from pot scourers, and untidy graffiti scrawled on the walls — familiar objects of dispossession and poverty, appropriated as ”pluralistic” trinkets and exhibited as art. As for the response of the young and the restless to this unexpected invasion of art turf, it can only be described as dazed and confused — an apt name for an exhibition which takes the concept of cultural effluent to previously uncharted depths.
Translate young and restless into puerile and listless and you’ll get some idea of the show’s merits. The fact that the conceptualists behind this exhibition include some of the most intelligent artists working in South Africa makes it all the more unforgivable.
The argot of choice for the restless, the subversive and (sometimes, sadly) the creatively challenged, conceptualism is one of the most misunderstood words in the art lexicon. In academic jargon, it can be defined as a means of ”making visible the mediation of experience by the institutional and discursive networks of culture”. In simpler words, it uses the flotsam of everyday life and non- sight-specific media such as language — as opposed to conventional art tools — to challenge and subvert the boundaries between high and low art, dematerialise the traditional art object and confound conventional aesthetic and ethical sensibilities.
But, paradoxically, conceptualism can’t avoid being caught in its own web. In attempting to dematerialise art, all but the best examples land up endorsing the inescapable materiality of art, or — as this exhibition illustrates — whittling away its creative essence to the point of annihilation.
Beneath its radical, subversive cape, conceptualism is just another genre: simultaneously liberating yet limiting, seeming to offer a window to a new language of representation, yet equally capable — in the absence of integrity and self-criticism – — of being reduced to a complacent system of self-reference and consensus.
And this is where the young and the restless have run horribly amok. In their desire to say big things about big issues, they have turned a strategy into an end game and a tool into a god. They seem to regard art not as the mediation and expression of lived, felt and internalised experience, but as a one-stop shopping expedition for one-liners, soundbites and cultural trinkets which are plucked off the shelf and discarded at whim. Using thick theory to prop up puny substance, their references are often vast in diameter. Yet in its visible translation, their work more often than not has the density of rice paper.
There is not a single piece on show that warrants an afterthought. Moshekwa Langa’s bundles — inspired by Joseph Beuys, and resembling turds or decomposing corpses — might just scrape through an end-of-year student assessment. Through a twee display of domestic bric-a-brac, Ian Waldeck has turned issues of ”art as appropriation” into ”the appropriation of someone else’s stuff as my art”.
Minnette Vari attempts to scratch below the surface of identity, representation and otherness using photographs of a cosmetics counter where a black salewoman stands next to the image of a white supermodel advertising a cosmetic cream. The skin puns, although well- intentioned, are about as subtle as a sledgehammer. And her attempt at intervention, by superimposing her own eyes on to the Clarins cosmetics logo, for example, is so obscure as to be virtually undetectable.
Even Marc Edwards seems to be losing his way in his efforts to explore issues of homelessness and cultural displacement. His work says something about context, aesthetics, abstraction, anthropology and archetypes. But precisely what remains murky, as is evident from his Young and Restless contribution — a cardboard shack taken from a shelter in London and an arrangement of plastic crates in different colours resembling an abstract sculpture, crop circles or a laager.
Which is kind of what these young and restless artists have become: a little laager, insular, smug, yet increasingly paranoid. Not only does their current work illustrate the perils of indiscriminate material swapping; it also shows the ghastly effects of too much ”hanging out together”, which have manifested themselves in a collective tendency to use bodily excretions as visual metaphors, the mistaken belief that conceptual art should resemble a shoddy stage set, a creative aridness which has reduced innovative cultural provocateurs to cultural retreads, an unflagging determination to make art communicative only in its incommunicability, and — saddest of all — a general imperviousness to criticism.
The work which sums it all up is an opus of questionable merit by Kendell Geers. Called Avant Garde (Arte Povera would have been equally appropriate), it consists of graffiti scrawled on the wall above a cardboard box filled with empty beer cans. The following is an extract from this ode to creative impoverishment: ”Destitute … Please Help. Contributions. God Bless You. PS. I’m sorry.”
Yeah, right. But, if art equals therapy (actually it doesn’t), then perhaps these artists need to let it all hang out — literally and metaphorically speaking — until they either take pity on the critics who are forced to extract sense from their sewage, or simply tire of conceptual bundu-bashing. And maybe, just maybe, unlike Hansel and Gretel, who got hopelessly lost in the forest, when they finally decide it’s time to turn around, the trail will still be there.
The Young and the Restless Without Permission is at the Sandton Art Gallery until April 27