ART: Hazel Friedman
IF there is one process with which South Africans are intimately, agonisingly familiar it is branding. Remember apartheid? You’d be hard pressed to find a more appropriate example of political cattle- branding. But the repetitive, mechanical action whereby a motif is burnt into an object as a sign of identity, ownership and classification does not merely hark back to a repugnant system of control.
The brand (no name, designer, whatever) has been deep etched into our collective psyche as a mark of consumption – a sign of materialistic times. And on the personal front it is an inherently violent act of scarification, a primitive record of abuse or bonding.
If Marco Cianfanelli’s first solo exhibition, Record, functioned on any one of the above levels it would still be noteworthy. The fact that its resonances are multivalent and that Cianfenelli taps into another South Africanism – the country’s ongoing love affair with landscape painting – makes this exhibition all the more seductive.
But Cianfanelli doesn’t use landscape painting as an exercise in nostalgia, even though his materials – burnt mielie sheaths, grass, chipboard and animal hide – evoke the land. Some of his brands – sacks, cows and milk cartons emblazoned on to little landscape oils – carry meanings “stapled” to the materials and subject matter on both physical and proverbial levels. Allusions to drought, fertility, nutrition and other land affairs are unavoidable.
But other branded motifs – still-life arrangements, portraits and motorcars, for example – although recognisable as such – are less fixed in semantic location. They allude to the language of desire and the disjunction between private and public domains, while highlighting the arbitrariness of signs and their meaning. But equally significant is the fact that Cianfanelli has taken what is all too often regarded as outmoded, essentially passive genres of still life and landscape into the arena of confrontation.
The conceptual focus of his work is not on the objects themselves – whether painted or branded – but on the ever-shifting interaction taking place between material, medium and meaning. And the terrain he encroaches on has a South Africanness about it that is anything but parochial.
Yet the mark he has made with his solo debut transcends the specifics of time and place, pointing the way for artists caught in a post-apartheid, post-identity crisis. And as a colleague pointed out after seeing the show, why hasn’t anyone yet thought of using a bull-shaped brand?
Record is on at the Generator Art Space in Newtown, Johannesburg, until October 5