BRENDA ATKINSON reviews three important exhibitions, by Jo Ractliffe, Terry Kurgan and Abrie Fourie, currently on show in Gauteng
IN one of her poems, Margaret Atwood writes, “the true story lies among the other stories”. Two solo shows at the Goodman Gallery meet between the lines of this statement, their deceptive softness couching the truth, stories, and lies behind their very different appearances.
Jo Ractliffe’s Guess Who Loves You consists of nine large colour photographs that occupy the main section of the gallery. Her works are initally perplexing – if exquisite – aesthetic objects.
Each photograph depicts a squeaky toy that belonged to the artist’s dog Gus – also her companion for 10 years – who died the day after the works were completed. These are toys that cemented the relationship between artist and dog – gifts returned as offerings, sanctified tokens of extraordinary affection.
But through Ractliffe’s eyes the toys are neither ordinary nor benign. Grotesquely enlarged and shot against a flat white background, they are all ravaged objects in varying states of decay. A duck, the lower half of a mechanical rabbit, a shark, all bear the puncture marks of Gus’s teeth.
The bits of sand and dried saliva that cling to them look like the flattened vessels in pasty pink arteries – both alien and touchingly familiar.
The show is in one sense a document of pathologies – at its most literal level, it wants you to guess that it’s your dog who loves you, unconditionally. But this is just one story, one question, that it begs.
The tension between the messy content and clinical form of the works treads the line between ridiculous sentiment and ironic distance.
Like reliquaries in a Catholic shrine, they facilitate our own fantasies about true love and sacrifice, longing and loss; they are potent symbols that can never be full or complete.
Their alternative iconic meaning is more profane – the title Guess who loves you was inspired by a coffee mug bearing the image of one of popular culture’s favourite pets, the self-obsessed Garfield.
Guess who loves you is not properly posed as a question, because for Ractliffe there is no definitive answer to the complexities of sentiment we call love.
Terry Kurgan’s Home Truths, lining the gallery wings, offers a similar emotional register in terms of her relationship to her young children. Where Kurgan’s recent photographs of her son Jonah were disturbing for the immediacy of the child’s sexuality, something new happens in the translation of photograph to drawing.
Although the second medium provides a distance between viewer and child, the psychic bonds and processes at play are no less fetishised. The child’s assumption of masculinity is now less innocent, more menacing. His figure – in one image looming behind his naked mother – anticipates a primal moment in which certain terms of endearment will be lost.
This is about the child’s loss as much as it is about the mother’s longing – Jonah’s playful omnipotence slips away even as his gestures assert it. The tensions and desire in the drawing are clear markers of a kind of bond that frays with the boy’s coming into knowledge.
In a separate series, titled Every Little Thing, Kurgan has documented with obsessive repetition a moment in the infancy of her daughter Jessie.The 13 drawings differ almost imperceptibly – through the orientation of the baby’s prone body, the placement of limbs, the degree of recognition or vacancy in the eyes.
Lightly dusted with blue or pink, the baby’s form combines terrifying delicacy and robust energy. Her body, sex foregrounded, is also the place of her mother’s identification and fears – the acquisition of femininity is fraught with implied frailties.
Guess Who Loves you and Home Truths are about more than any one relationship; they mourn with great courage the lack that prevents any bond from finding its perfect form.
Abrie Fourie’s surprising show – installed in his own flat overlooking Vermeulen Street – takes its conceptual premise from Acts 17: “Because He himself gives all men live and breathe and everything else … “
Called Imagine No Petrol Stations inside this House, the show’s invitation uses the image of a Shell Ultra petrol pump as a metaphorical stand-in for spiritual fuel.
The banal image is also entirely literal – what if the ubiquitous fuel-pumps that drive our lives, courtesy of global capitalism, were to suddenly break down?
The works themselves are reached by a conceptual leap and an endless flight of stairs. Inside Fourie’s warren of a flat the rooms are sealed off by sheets of black mesh, as is a large altar of personal belongings re-installed in the centre of the lounge.
The walls are stencilled with odd phrases, such as God is Not in All His Thoughts, that have a sense of being prior, of having existed apart from the decision to display them publicly. Photographs transformed into translucent light boxes glow in some of the rooms, each a panorama of the suburb as seen from the vantage point of Fourie’s flat window. One is left wondering how he and his partner negotiate life in a space that is at once home, museum and unlikely muse.
Fourie’s stated understanding of “home” as body, and petrol pump as fuel, is not an entirely convincing association.
Postcards, light boxes, rooms and contained views need a little more work before they can hang together with maximum impact. For now, the associations are slippery, easily overlooked.
“Imagine” is, nevertheless, a brave exhibition – not only because it invites strangers and friends into an intimately raw space, but because most contemporary artists would rather be seen wearing Foschini sales items than have anyone suspect them of being “spiritual”, let alone Christian.
That said, the exhibition is very much of this world. Its urban references are crassly commercial; the photographs of some of Arcadia’s skylines are deliberately modest.
These are buildings that, like the petrol pump, aspire to little other than servicing the needs of an urban periphery.
And this is a show that is not concerned with positioning itself in relation to a material centre.
Abrie Fourie’s Imagine No Petrol Stations inside this House is at 31 Michael House, Vermeulen Street, Pretoria, until July 3Jo Ractliffe and Terry Kurgan are exhibiting their works at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg until August 2