FINE ART: Hazel Friedman
I’M not sure whether Laura Godfrey-Isaac’s Evolution deserves to be dived into, pigged-out-on or treated like a pimple and popped. But that’s precisely the initial beauty of her (mis)anthropomorphic forms. Depending on a whole host of factors — some of them genetically determined — they can be seen as runny ice-cream cones dropped by the gods, suppurating syphilitic sores, industrial spillage or mutant blobs from an alien galaxy. They clearly live in the land of Pretend, where dreams and nightmares coalesce.
Like the ink blots in the Rorschach Test, their semantic parameters are defined by the imagination of the viewer. And British-born Godfrey-Isaacs — exhibiting for the first time in South Africa after doing a brief residency here courtesy of the British Council — accepts all interpretations with equal alacrity.
Clearly, her mutating polyurethane mounds, plasticine sculptures and her most recent output — padded paintings resembling soiled sweets — constitute attempts to access childhood memories, to engage with the sheer materiality of her forms and indulge in squooshy, messy activities normally precluded from the grown-up club. Yet simultaneously they deal with issues pertinent to contemporary art discourse: subversion of the hallowed gallery space, the abject, excess, bodily fluids and shifting balances of power behind the magnification of the object and its miniaturisation.
One may apprehend them as abstract expressionist sculptures — forms whose materiality subsumes meaning. Yet like the cakes in an early Penny Siopis painting, the visceral responses they evoke are far removed from those of quiet aesthetic contemplation.
But once the comfort zones (or discomfort, depending on which side of the cheek one’s tongue is lodged) has been crossed, Godfrey-Isaacs work becomes a little too “so whattish?”.
Inspired by the works of Mike Kelly and American artist Lynda Benglis that parodied the Modernist preoccupation with the mark, as suggested by artist and critic Colin Richards in his eloquent essay accompanying the exhibition,
Godfrey-Isaacs’s work largely depends — like many attempts at artistic and semantic subversion — on exegetical (or first hand) explanation for its validation. Without articulated theory, the work remains lodged in the upper regions of the solar plexus, never quite bridging the space where a laugh and gasp are indistinguishable.
Its flaws lie not in its frivolity (although Godfrey-Isaacs is bound to receive a few knuckle-raps from post-apartheid purists), but in its sameness. The sense one gets is not of uncontained, potentially malevolent excess, but rather of neat, repeated and ultimately isolated expositions on the issues thereof. And after a while, anaesthesia sets in. A blob becomes a blob, becomes a blob.
Laura Godfrey-Isaacs’s exhibition is on at the Rembrandt van Rijn gallery until September 28