FINE ART:Hazel Friedman
LAST year’s Unplugged exhibition will go down in South African art history as a supreme example of the “buddy system” at its worst. Initiated by artist Kendell Geers as a riposte to the traditional curatorial process – whereby the curator determines the content and presentation of an exhibition – Unplugged set itself up as a transparent, democratic event with artists determining process and product via a nomination system.
But the chain letter principle got hopelessly lost in the delivery. Unplugged II is a different beast, in part. Co- ordinated by artist Malcolm Payne – who was last year chosen by Geers, (who was this year chosen by Payne), it has not attached itself to a singular thematic peg. And like its precursor it has not relied on curatorial intervention (which would have defeated the aim of the exhibition). But unlike the artistic incest and conceptual befuddlement that characterised much of the work on last year’s show, this exhibition has spread itself wider – in the geographical sense, anyway.
The couplings are also not as predictable as in the previous exhibition. For example, Minette Vari selected Siemon Allen from Durban, who in turn chose fellow-Durbanite Aliza Levi. The fact that Allen and Levi, along with Claudette Schreuders from Cape Town (chosen by the Cape’s Lisa Brice), are regarded as three of the names to watch on the contemporary art scene, perhaps means that future Unpluggeds will not remain confined within the cushy ambit of Gauteng’s traditional art cliquedom.
But breadth should not be confused with depth. In her exploration of bodies prostrated in indeterminate spaces, Levi, for example, displays little more than the degree to which she can integrate the styles of Jane Alexander and sculptor Wilma Cruise. But she does this without the former’s metaphoric richness and gritty realism and the latter’s monumentalism.
Schreuders’s Barbie and Ken sculptures easily achieve “endearing” status. Full of trendy tattoos, they are the 1990s mannequins for someone’s mantelpiece. But that’s about it. As for Peet Pienaar’s contribution – a pair of found (as in bought) shoes – it is irrefutably quaint and whimsical.
By contrast, Jeremy Wafer’s quirky venture into the realm of op art is both visually enticing and intellectually charged. A triptych of glass paintings resembling black seed pods, or black holes, his work is at once archetypal and iconic; heraldic and metamorphic.
Willem Boshoff has also produced a compelling if slightly cumbersome work. An epitaph of sorts to apartheid, it is called Shredded Evidence and consists of a concrete poetry sculpture in block form. Papered with 48 “scrapped” laws of apartheid – 1948 was the year the National Party assumed power – it serves as a monolithic monument to the attempted erasure of crimes committed under the guise of legality.
Kevin Brand’s equally monumental Do Earthlings Not Embrace Love provides a poignant indictment of war. It consists of three figures of children constructed from metal and chipboard, haphazardly hung as though thrown into the air during an explosion. Initially their de- individualised, severed torsoes could resemble uneven slabs of meat. Except for the fact that Brand has treated them as enlarged photocopies, photographs or freeze-framed documentary images. Up close, the forms are made up of magnified dots, like photographic pixels.
A semblance of coherence crumbles and details within the seemingly amorphous mass are differentiated only by shadings of red to denote blood, and black for facial features. It is only from a distance that their tragic humaness can be deciphered. And most accusatory of all, perhaps, the forms have been bolted to the chipboard by screws bearing the name Denel – the company that manufactures military equipment. Brand depicts the horror of war and its victims without vulgar sensationalism, shock or schlock tactics, but rather with an overwhelming sense of humanism and respect for his subjects.
Coincidentally, Geers has focused on a similar theme: violence and its relationship to art. But with a vastly different agenda. Called TW (title withheld) Rock (a throwback to the surrealist artist Magritte’s Floating Rock) his work consists of a news insert detailing one of the most shameful episodes in the anti-apartheid struggle: the necklacing of Maki Skosana in July 1985. This was perpetrated by a frenzied mob in front of an international audience and the footage was broadcast, at length, on SABC as a propaganda triumph by the authorities at the time.
Geers has used the visual footage with a voice-track of Magritte talking about the ways in which two incongruous images must find a way of reconciling. It’s on sale for R1-million and Geers has offered the proceeds to the Truth and Reconcilation Commission.
Geers has merely appropriated and decontextualised the brutal sequence from its own history and directly transplanted it on to art, which in turn has been dislocated from its own history and transposed on to life. The work offers no additional insights. Its role is little more than propagandist, echoing the truism that art is art and life is life. This, sadly, is art at its most soulless
And on the issue of appropriation, while white artists clearly have no qualms about including what is essentially the history of black South Africans in their work, they have not extended a similar courtesy to even one of the black contemporary artists working in South Africa to participate in this show.
Unplugged II will be more fondly remembered than its predecessor. But it might also be recalled as yet another example of artistic whitewashing with Made in the Old RSA stamped all over it.
Unplugged II is at the Rembrandt van Rijn Gallery in Johannesburg until March 15