FINEART: Andrew Putter
FOR just over a year now, a group of top- drawer young Cape Town artists have been working on a collaborative project, set to culminate in a mammoth installation/performance at the Castle this week.
Called Sluice, the project grew out of collective interests in new ways of approaching artmaking – and shared frustration that there were no formal opportunities to explore such approaches. Six of the core group of eight artists are students at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Michaelis School of Fine Art. The remaining two are a graduate from the UCT Drama school and a Rhodes Fine Art graduate.
Despite Michaelis’s progressive reputation, the school seems unable to provide its more adventurous students with workable learning experiences. So, Dorothee Kreutzfeldt, having just completed her Bachelor of Fine Art degree, expended almost fanatical energy to help bring Sluice into being – by developing an extra-curriculum programme.
As anyone who’s been in a band will know, working creatively in teams is not an easy business. Cant about synergy notwithstanding, collaboration can be a dirty, frustrating activity. This is even more so in the art world, where individualism, competition and paranoid back-stabbing have been the order of the decade.
Predictably, the first open meetings at the beginning of the year were packed. Just as predictably, numbers quickly dwindled. Some stopped coming because they were frustrated with what looked like “too many boring meetings”, some because of the heat of egos clashing and others simply because they began to see how much work lay ahead.
Once the group settled into a team things began to happen. Initially, they were given a room in the old pathology laboratory adjacent to the art school. Used in the past for washing down cadavers, the sign on the room’s door reads “Sluice Room” – hence the group’s name. However the promised space failed to materialise – one amongst many other of the institution’s failures to lend support – nevertheless the group retained the name Sluice.
Sluice has organised several installations, workshops, performances and meetings over the past year. There was a hip, sterile installation of fake bathroom tiles, a water-filled bath and glistening black rubber at the Planet Artsite.
The culmination of the group’s activities was conceptualised as an installation/performance at the Castle. Most recently, the group’s beautifully produced promo material – teasers, fliers and tickets for the performances – have started appearing in and around the city.
Made famous as an artsite by the Scurvy/Secret Seven show in 1995, the Castle’s rambling, multi-venue B-Block lends itself well to the sorts of exploration the group have embarked upon. Centring on the city – as metaphor, possibility, history – and using video, light, sound, painting, performance and installation – the Sluice piece de resistance aims to evoke some of the layered complexity of what it means to live in the mother city.
It seems that Sluice will engage far more directly with the history and conceptual richness of their site than either the Secret Seven or the Faultline artists have. Financial support has been made available – the German Consulate and the Foundation for the Creative Arts are acting as the main sponsors.
The most heartening thing about the Sluice endeavour is the group’s tenacity and courage. They have had to fight, trust and inspire one another in ways that far exceed the normal boundaries of artmaking. They should also be commended for the exemplary way in which they have managed to engineer their own learning.
The Sluice group comprises Dorothee Kreutzfeldt, Julia Clark, Sally Stephens, Sarah van der Bijl, Craig Parker, Tom Cullberg, Adam Lieber and Mandy Jandrell – names worth watching out for