Chris Roper: On show in Cape Town
The Association for Visual Arts, or AVA as it’s more popularly known, has got three distinct exhibition spaces on its premises in the trendy Church Street Mall. Their habit of showing three different exhibitions in the respective spaces means that the viewer is often forcibly made aware of the joys of reading the artists’ work against each other.
This can make the experience that much richer by the intertextualities between the works, as is the case with the current show featuring three artists from Johannesburg. The long gallery features Vitiate, drawings by Diane Victor. Showing in the main gallery is Gordon Froud’s Vestiges and up the steps in the Artsstrip CJ Morkel’s bright airbrushes assault the senses with Volition: Chacun … Son Gout.
The order of description is important, because that’s the progression in which you encounter the work. First, Victor’s intricate pastel and charcoal drawings, densely frightening and with horrific meaning. They are also very beautiful and delicate, and if that’s a paradox it’s one that gives the work its meaning. Patience as a Virtue shows a hairy-backed man who appears to be sexually molesting a child. There’s a rocking horse in the corner and teddy bears, all the accoutrements of the nursery. Behind the door are what seem to be burglars of some sort, one wearing a balaclava. Are they waiting to take their turn at the violence? Is the molester also an intruder, or is he a family member?
In Reaping What One Has Sown, an angel has been shot by men spilling out of a car. In the left corner of the drawing is what looks like a man being fellated. Or am I imagining that? One thing is unequivocal: these are very South African images.
Through into the Main Gallery, and Gordon Froud’s colourful panels in inflated PVC bags strike you more forcibly because of the sombre black and white of Victor’s drawings. Froud’s work is influenced by Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (1998 is the 100th anniversary of Lewis Carroll’s death), as well as Jeff Noon’s postmodern rewriting. The resultant work is whimsical and bitingly satirical. The titles reveal dual references, to a South African political moment or personage as well as a character in Alice.
Alongside the works are printed extracts from the texts, that refer both to the characters named and the people or organisations they are chosen to parody. You have Nelson Mandela as You’re Old, Father William, Nkosasana Zuma as the Duchess, Eugene Terre’blanche as the Horse Rider and Jessie Duarte as Humpty Dumpty. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela is portrayed as the Queen of Hearts (yes, “off with their heads” is the accompanying text).
The panel sports a grey inflatable dagger with a little yellow AK47 on it, tiny dolls’ heads and torsos, and a nursery blanket for a background. Intriguingly, one of Froud’s panels features The Art World (Alice herself) as one of the political players in South Africa.
Upstairs at the Artsstrip, one is confronted by black sheeting, installed to shield the casual gallery visitor from CJMorkel’s airbrushed sexual images. The works are ostensibly meant to convey the artist’s belief that consenting adults have the right to choose the parameters of their sexual world, with the understanding that when this affects others, they too must be consenting adults.
This is not an entirely startling idea, and the work reflects this naive manifesto. A woman masturbating with a gun in her vagina, c’mon. A woman being sodomised, one being fist fucked. If the subject matter might appear hackneyed to some, the execution is gorgeous, all bright colours and surface splendour.
As you leave, you stop to take another look at one of Diane Victor’s pieces, Cake. Cake servers nestle in a white vinyl box lined with purple velvet. They are engraved with women’s heads, except for the centre one which shows labia and pubic hair. The congruencies of domestic implements and gendered representation are dramatic in their unstated differences, and can perhaps synecdochically stand for the impact of the show as a whole.