PHOTOGRAPHY: Marilyn Keegan –
THE invitation to Canned Africa at Cape Town’s Association for Visual Arts describes it as a photographic exhibition. This, however, is a trifle misleading. In these 11 giant works, Geoffrey Grundlingh has pushed the frontiers of photography into another dimension.
He has been the head of the photographic department at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at UCT since 1980 and during this time 17 of his photographs have been purchased or commissioned by the SA National Gallery.
Works from this exhibition will be travelling to Oslo, Norway in 1997, where Grundlingh has been invited to exhibit with 14 other South African artists (these include William Kentridge, Penny Siopis, Lukas van Vuuren and Willie Bester) at the Nation Museum for Contemporary Art.
It’s unusual for a ”photographer” to be invited to exhibit with artists – but Grundlingh will be at ease since his work represents a vital departure.
Grundlingh uses his camera like a brush and his tripod as an easel: it is not photography that you see on the wall. Rather, the works take the viewer on a strange ride through the realms of echoes, connections, odd coincidences and unexplained resonances. Using the reflective technique of triptych, he harnesses disparate images that assume a life of their own – they actually converse with each other – leaving the viewer to guess, for a very long time, exactly what those relationships are.
He is a mischievous artist who shatters assumed perceptions and invokes an emotional reaction of lunatic ambiguity. A diamond-mesh fence becomes the outline of Table Mountain; the bronze bust of P W Botha in a museum is a cadaverous shadow. ”Happy Valley” in Port Elizabeth is toned and crafted into a landscape of bleak desertion.
Grundlingh’s work is never overtly political (or social or historical) – it is the voluntary associations the viewer is enticed to make between photographs in the diptych of triptych that gives the work its content.
Perhaps the saddest part about this exhibition (which closes on September 7), is that only one of the 11 works has been reserved. Apparently large corporations do not buy ”photographs” – particularly those that pose some challenging questions above the boardroom table.
Says Grundlingh: ”The idea of buying photography for the corporate lobby is a concept that is beginning to happen in Europe, but not here. Buyers from the large companies want innocuous still-life and flowers.”
It’s a pity – these are broad canvases which play merry havoc with our common understanding of ”reality” and lead the imagination into some intriguing by-ways.
Grundlingh’s photographs are on show until September 7 at The Association for Visual Arts in Cape Town