HAZEL FRIEDMAN finds out why the work of
local art guru, the late Neil Goedhals, is hanging in Johannesburg finds out why t
THE life and death of Johannesburg artist Neil Goedhals inspired as much myth-making as his work inspired emulation. Six years after his death, his memory and the legacy he bequeathed to a younger generation of conceptual artists retains a fuzzy-edged, tinted aura usually reserved for cult figures.
An epileptic, he died at the Christ-like age of 33 by diving – some say falling – off the roof of his Yeoville apartment block in mid-1990.
Yet posthumous mystique cannot cloud the fact that Goedhals was one of the pioneers of conceptualism in South Africa. He was employing maps and found objects – the residue of ready-made mass culture – as well as confronting issues of the body politic at a time when the former belonged to the cartographer’s lexicon and the latter was bandied about only at academic conventions. He revelled in a “styleless” style, feigned amateurism and explored differing artistic traditions – even dabbled in numerology – to expose the arbitrariness of meaning and fight artistic mediocrity.
Even though his works were visually banal, his play on words and images and his archive of references – from Wopko Jensma to the Kabbalah – were extraordinary in depth and breadth.
It is in acknowledgement of his ongoing influence that art dealer Warren Siebrits has curated Black (on the) Inside – a suitably sparse exhibition based around a single work by Goedhals.
It is not only the piece itself that invites attention. It is also the relationship between this work and another co-exhibited piece produced by Kendell Geers during his student years which reveals the influence he exerted on the latter.
Geers’s work consists of a giant tyre with part of the racist rhyme, Eenie Meenie Mynie Mo, written on it. Produced in the 1980s, the work makes reference to the “necklacing” method of justice meted out to apartheid’s informants. Deliberately crude and abrasive, it encapsulates the time and place in which it was executed.
Goedhals’s work, although also apparently simple in execution, is more layered. Produced between 1987 and 1990 it includes a street map of Johannesburg on which Goedhals has traced his bearings, both autobiographical and artistic. The other side includes a geometrical diagram on which the word “lazy” is written in lettraset and “failed map” is scrawled in his handwriting.
The words nullify the documents – and by implication the institutions – that separate us into different categories of identification, location and achievement. They suggest Goedhals’s anger towards a culture of mediocrity that refuses to engage critically with information. By disfiguring official documents, he transforms them from objects of authority to objects of art(ifice).
Yet as radical as the work was when it was first produced, if one looks at Goedhals’s art in relation to the flashy one-liners currently being churned out by some of his conceptualist progeny, Geodhals seems strangely traditional, even aesthetic, by comparison. What was once marginalised has, inevitably, become mainstream. This irony would probably have amused Goedhals. His response to some of the “star-tists” who have risen in his wake might be somewhat different.
Black (on the) Inside runs through January at Metroplex, Rosebank Mews, 173 Oxford Road Rosebank