Alex Sudheim On exhibition in Durban
Upon arrival at the NSA Gallery, each spectator/participant is given a sheet of paper bearing words: random fragments of random texts. Mine says: “The summer air”. The person next to me gets something in Zulu. Someone else’s says: “Why?” Shortly thereafter, German artist Angelika Flaig collects all the papers and her performance begins.
Moving to electronic music by avant- garde German composer Matthias Schneider-Hollek and bathed in ultraviolet light, Flaig proceeds to feed the pages through a paper shredder. The bundles of shreds are strewn across the floor, whereafter she ceremoniously coats herself in duct tape. A scratchy transparency of the word “Styx” covers a curtain draped across the wall behind her.
Covered in sticky film, Flaig wallows among the shredded paper. Strips adhere to her body as the “dead angel” (Durban artist Carol Gainer) emerges from behind the curtain to transport Flaig across the river Styx in a metal boat. With a huge carving knife, the angel severs Flaig’s paper-bedecked overall from her body and cocoons her in an enormous piece of fabric before placing her in the boat to ship her to her doom.
Through her performance Flaig rips into the act of communication, posing questions about whether we can ever be understood in the way we intend through language. Her allegory could be read as: You are given the words. You use the words. You shred the words. You wallow in the remains of the words. You break free of the hold of the words. The words condemn you. The words save you.
But there is an intuitive intensity in Flaig’s work which transcends any intellectual pretensions it might have. This leads back to her fundamental fascination with the idea of ritual. Ritual is communication through action; the transmission of unspoken thought through gesture and action.
In the Seventies Flaig caused a stir in Germany with her photo-portraits of street signs framed to look like classical portaits of European nobility. “Because in Europe we have no rituals,” she says. “The only thing we share is the signs we look at on the road, the supermarket shelves we reach to. These things have replaced religion, but they are empty. There are no mysteries anymore.”
Indeed, Flaig’s disregard for the clean, clinical nature of modern life is expressed in her recent series of lithographs, African Plant Series. They are haunting, visceral black-and-white works whose visual abstraction seems to bear little resemblance to the source of their inspiration. Yet, as Flaig says of her visit to South Africa a year ago, “The experience taught me to open myself again.”
The works are a sensual, intuitive response to the powerful natural energy she discovered here, and indicate why she arrived in this country with “hardly any cultural baggage” for the second round of the Durban meets Stuttgart meets Durban cultural exchange.
Rediscovering the human part of herself is crucial to her project here. Though arresting and powerful in their sinewy immediacy, Flaig describes many of her previous works as essentially technical and abstract.
The performance aspect of her exhibition is a manifestation of her desire to “bring back the human” in her work, though not in an obvious, didactic manner. Thus, in the following two instalments of her live trilogy – Paper Flower on August 21 and Grounding on September 1 – Flaig herself will only participate externally while dancers respond spontaneously to her gestures.
Of the intuitive roughnesss of her live works and the nervous energy of her prints, Flaig says: “We live in fast times. The process must be fast.” In other words, the reaction to the stimulus must be immediate, or that fleeting grasp upon the moment will have evaporated before those clumsy old words arrive to give it the semblance of shape.
Angelika Flaig’s lithographs can be viewed at the NSA Gallery, 166 Bulwer Rd.