Standing in the MuseumAfrica in Newtown, gazing at an extraordinary floor-plan built of bricks, I was briefly distracted by two authentic, dyed-in-the-tie hippies. Walking in their wake, my friends and I saw something on the floor. We picked it up. It was the biggest, fattest, most artfully rolled joint we had ever seen.
We had a lot of fun visiting Johannesburg’s Biennale venues. Having called me earlier in the week to get the skinny on headline- screaming rumours of “fraud” at the Biennale, my two friends – neither involved in the art world – had the time of their lives.
Judging by the four venues, there is very little that is fraudulent, or masturbatory, about the art on the Biennale, unless the latter term describes the pleasure of frequent ecstatic encounters. With the exception of Hong Kong, etc. – Hou Hanru’s show at the Rembrandt Gallery, which is a poorly finished and unremarkable exhibition in which none of the tech works – there are enough blissful moments to soften even the hardest of old philistines.
At MuseumAfrica, Yu Yeon Kim’s Transversions is a thoughtfully curated, beautiful exhibition that had me swooning like a post-delusional St Theresa. Diller and Scofidio’s video installation Pageant is possibly the most perfectly realised conceptual art work I’ve seen. Stepping into a dark room, the visitor stops short in front of a large rectangle-format projection on the floor – a “screen” that you feel you might fall into.
A series of black-and-white logos morphs in an endless “pageant” of brand-name symbols. Honda, AEG, BMW, Macdonalds, and hundreds of others mutate with sinister blandness into more silent signifiers of capital, power, pleasure, and desire.
On a more overtly dystopic note, Keith Piper’s immense three-screen video work The Exploded City is a moody multimedia contemplation of urban apocalypse.
Piper’s unique texture-mapped visions of the “encoded city” are glossed by a mournful monotone narrative of the Tower of Babel – the traumatic fragmentation of fantasised cultural unity.
The most fun to be had at Transversions is in Xu Bing’s classroom, which is in fact a work entitled Classroom: Calligraphy, where visitors themselves can sit down and contribute to the work. Bing, a Chinese artist, takes the mystery – and the mickey – out of the West’s enduring need to mystify the Orient as inscrutable, exotic, and absolutely Other.
In this classroom, rows of chairs are arranged at desks, where books, ink-wells, and paint brushes are neatly positioned. In the books are the outlines of Chinese characters, and each component of the character carries a number. A “teacher” on a video screen invites pupils to paint by numbers, telling them how to do it correctly. Only the characters, on closer inspection, turn out to be made of letters of the English alphabet, forming easily legible English words.
Despite its emphasis on video and Internet technologies, Transversions is curated so that these elements retain their uniqueness and interest, and the web projects – notably Kyong Il Park’s Serenade and Stephen Hobbs’ Dusk Til Dusk are rare examples of web art that actually works, both as art and as interactive exploration.
Gerardo Mosquera’s show Important/Exportant, at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, has a few gems, including Hiroshi Sugimoto’s eerily eloquent photographs of different sea-scape horizons.
David Medalla and Adam Nankervis have set up a work called Trade Winds, a low table covered with the remnants of a trading frenzy that took place earlier on at the gallery, in which visitors were invited to bring objects to trade for other objects. The work lives on in sadly attenuated form, but the idea is good.
Nearby, Willem Boshoff’s The Writing that Fell off the Wall is a more sober and unsettling look at the “seven tongues of trade in Africa” and their languages of classification and control.
Finally, at the Electric Workshop’s vast Alternating Currents exhibition, you can zero in on Oladele Bamigboye’s lyrically provocative Celebrate Series of photographs, Seydou Keta’s portraits, Isaac Julien’s short film Fanon SA, Sergio Vega’s Back to Backyard Eden Express installation, and Kay Hassan’s reconstructed Shebeen.
In the words of the renegade art critic and minor film star Cookie Mueller: get ready for fat eyes.