Tracy Murinik On show in Cape Town
I’ll admit to being a little sceptical when first hearing about the exhibition Childhood. Graffiti art in the Irma Stern Museum sounded gimmicky. Well, it isn’t. In fact, the collaboration between artists Gregg Smith, Mustafa Maluka, Ice and Sky 1 got me swallowing my words instantly. They have produced a show that’s sassy, innovative, witty, intelligent, and full of spunk. And this is not “just” graffiti.
There is a rich interplay and collision of an array of visual languages and art-making traditions which each artist brings with him, from “gangster graffiti” to hip-hop, to “traditional” fine art. Four boys emerging, each from a different hood, claiming space, or rather, territory to transcribe their own histories.
It has the feel of a competitive showdown: these are playful, but pertinent taunts, showing one another up in what they describe as a spirit of “mock aggression”. Each mark appears as a challenging response or a witty retort to the one before it. This is rhetoric of supreme quality, street-wise and sussed. “My geagte dwells to wells/of consciousness”, is how you are introduced at the entrance to the exhibition in a scrawl of pen on glass. “The installation presents a series of personal territories which have been invaded and violated.”
Comprising the installation are a series of highly textured surfaces that range from between 25x30cm to 2.1x1m and cover almost the entire space. Smith has constructed these panels using a combination of wood, canvas and corrugated cardboard, intricately and elegantly designed to invoke and imitate a range of different floor surface designs, both public and private.
He describes these floor patterns as representing “a series of private territories which have been exposed to a process of vandalism” by the four artists. The dialogues that emerge in this process each recall elements of things specific to their remembered childhood environments: the visual codes and languages reflecting, like local dialects, the nature of those environments. In the case of Maluka, Ice and Sky 1, the languages, visual and verbal, from different parts of the Cape Flats, are strongly contrasted with the seemingly placid, leafy suburbia inscribed by Smith.
On the larger panels, all four artists work together in ways that self-consciously oppose the other. Although these accomplish powerfully aesthetic results, the artists have described themselves as deliberately avoiding a too-easy, comfortable visual fusion.
The different markings literally cut into one another. Smith’s more traditional portraits, quietly painted images of his family, his animals and himself, have been neatly framed and inlaid into the surfaces. These are then echoed by postcards and small reproductions of Western art history’s masterpieces, including mostly Impressionist works by Manet, Seurat and Sisley among others, which Maluka has renamed, re-interpreted and reclaimed to include his own visual history.
But below the hardcore veneer is an underlying sentimentality that pervades in the work, simultaneously compassionate and ironic. And this commentary is extended also to the space of the museum. The Irma Stern Museum itself is a space of ambiguity, Stern having been caught between genuine strains of human empathy and more awkwardly, of fascination with Africa. I believe that it is elements of both that these artists have set out to reclaim.