FINE ART: Hazel Friedman
Local Colours is like a one-stop spaza experience for the new South African. Mind you, while it doesn’t quite match the hyperrealism of a Disneyland tour, it also serves as a sort of technicolour theme park for the culturally curious.
Curated with a quirky eye by Karen Harber, Local Colours is one of those serendipitous “gap fillers” which might prove to be one of Wits Gallery’s most entertaining exhibitions this year, probably because it doesn’t take itself too seriously.
The exhibition includes a street vendor’s impromptu ode to insecticides and rat poison, traditional dolls made from sisal and curiously wooden cityscapes painted by William Kentridge and Simon Stone in the late 1980s.
There’s a toy camera belonging to film-maker Harriet Gavshon, comprising an equally curious montage of photographs of white bathing beauties and black “ethnotica”, not to mention the 1936 footage taken from an African Mirror promotional film on the City of Gold.
Punted as a Shopper’s Guide to Joburg, it sets out — by juxtaposing artworks mainly from the Wits Permanent Collection — to display them within a dynamic urban context.
Eschewing the normally arid ethnographic approach of the conventional museum display, it releases the objects from their display cabinets and attempts to imbue them with a purpose other than as “collectables”.
Local colours also attempts to take the exhibition out of its “synchronic” present — an academic approach to anthropology which tends to objectify and suspend the subjects in a frozen landscape — instead infusing the objects with movement and mirth.
It is unashamedly touristy. But somehow — perhaps again because it doesn’t take itself too seriously — it avoids some of the failures of other, more ponderous (and pretentious) curatorial efforts.
For one thing, by actively involving the participants in the curatorial and display process, the exhibition has not been reduced to a pornographic display of objects of desire. In Colours, the focus, while not on “authorness”, is most certainly not on otherness.
But as any intrepid urban meanderer will confirm, Johannesburg today — as in the past — is a city of contradictions and surface hue cannot camouflage the cracks of homelessness, unemployment and crime. These are clearly the no-go areas of Local Colours. But it has been advertised as a mugger-free shopping experience. And if it doesn’t make it into the annals of local art history, the Department of Tourism should ask if they can appropriate it for a Buy South African culture campaign.
The exhibition is on at the Gertrude Posel gallery until November 15