ART: Greg Bowes
THIS is possibly the most desirable shopfront I’ve ever seen, but seemingly without a shop. It can’t be for the Chinese supermarket next door because the display consists of a stunning array of rare and collectable techno records, and it can’t be for dance music outlet and DJ hangout Acid Dog/Liquid Records, because that’s in a completely different corner of Rosebank’s bustling shopping mecca.
Warren Siebrits’s Galerie Metroplex, two windows between two malls, could easily pass for a shopfront. His latest show is TFI: Techno Factory Invention – and the coloured vinyl, picture discs and space-age sleeves are coupled with a poster featuring three reproduced images of Andy Warhol. This may initially seem incongruous, but of course Warhol used to design display windows, and dabbled in album cover art.
Siebrits tells me he loves counterpoint, and the book juxtaposes Warhol with other pioneers and arts movements, including futurism, musique concrte and pop music.
What links these trends is their protagonists’ attitude towards and use of technology, to which the “Techno” in the title refers. It also obviously refers to the music, of which there are some downright stealable examples in the windows.
Techno music evolved in America’s “motor city” Detroit, where robots were rapidly replacing people in the factories, resulting in unemployment, urban decay and the worst crime level in the US. Against this backdrop, three black students, who had been weaned on a diet of Kraftwerk and Euro-pop, picked up the cheap electronic equipment they found in second-hand shops and began creating music.
Juan Atkins had a hit as Cybotron as early as 1984 with Clear, its synthetic tones and brutal percussion fitting in perfectly with a wave of body-popping and electro hip-hop. Derrick May (as Rhythim is Rhythim) and Kevin Saunderson (as Reese and Inner City) continued blending sounds that were both soulful and alien, jacking the human up to the machine.
It was going to be the music of the future, and it arrived clad in lots of complicated high-tech imagery, but still remains a largely “underground” phenomenon. May DJ’d in South Africa recently with Detroit techno’s new hero Jeff Mills, and I’m sure anyone who was there, as Siebrits and I were, would tell you the same thing: that Mills is a radical.
His unique playing style had everyone crowding around. As soon as one record is mixed out he’s mixing in another.
The sonic and graphic implications of this music may mean little to the stuffy fine arts academy right now, but Siebrits sees it as the latest in a long line of innovation. He is constantly on the lookout for the next trend – or the seeds of the next revolution.
The last line in the exhibition book states simply “Future = Reality”, and Siebrits is ready to embrace this and all its possible inventions.
Galerie Metroplex is in Rosebank Mews, 173 Oxford Road, Rosebank, Johannesburg