Tracy Murinik On show in Cape Town
“Everything is art,” I am informed as I sit down for the interview. Well, that should leave impotent and irrelevant those irksome and defensive little retorts of “but is it art?” that often riddle commentary around work that cannot be mounted flush against a wall.
“Even when you write a review, that is your art”, proceeds their philosophy.
Suddenly docile, I am consoled, reassured, encompassed by this vision. Everything Is Art is a new artwork by Peet Pienaar and Barend de Wet in which the two will play “Duchampian style games in a makeshift art cabinet” on Saturday May 16 at Joao Ferreira Fine Art in Cape Town between 11am and 12 noon. Thus states the press release.
But the two artists – the former a famed “human sculpture” and the latter renowned for resigning and rejoining the “art world” at a whim, and often arriving back stark naked, explain that their piece is not a performance per se. They insist that it needs to be understood as an artwork.
I hesitate to arrive at the difference. Why do they think that performance cannot be an artwork, I inquire. As explanation they offer that the “performance” label limits the possibilities of the artwork. “People expect you to be doing something,” says Pienaar. “This piece has no beginning and no end. But it’s there for an hour. We’re prepared to be part of our artwork for that hour,” adds De Wet. “We don’t want to draw the line around what is art.” Fair enough!
“The artwork” will have Pienaar dressed up in a suit, sitting across the way from De Wet, undressed, bearing “plastic boobs, a wig, tattoos on his stomach, and his penis tucked between his legs”. They’ll be playing Monopoly. A photocopy on the wall will enclose the reference to Duchamp playing chess opposite a naked woman. Plenty of room for sexual ambiguity happening here.
This scenario will take place within a plastic “cabinet”, invoking references to Thomas Hisch- horn’s piece from last year’s Munster Sculpture Festival, which featured a precarious-looking structure, flimsily wrapped in plastic, and vaguely reminiscent of a squatter shack. Pienaar describes the inherent contradiction of playing Monopoly, which is about “the shift of power and the things that you own” from inside this type of squatter shack.
As part of a longer-term project which De Wet and Pienaar have embarked on, namely body-building their physiques into competition-worthy fitness over the next two years, the first edition of their custom-made and designed sports gear will also be on sale and hung on the walls in the gallery. These too are artworks, fully-fledged with an embroidered logo claiming ART/KUNS, and labelled with a small patriotic flag.
“We’re just a catalyst in understanding about art,” says De Wet. “We provide a visual interest, but art is in the eye of the beholder. There’s nothing to get’: you come with your own references. It’s the creation from nothing to something. Anything could happen. The gas lamp inside the plastic cabinet could explode, for example, and there would be other references. Like Duchamp’s broken glass, it was only when it shattered that he could declare how it is finished’.”