Tracy Murinik On show in Cape Town
Joyous myths that are conventionally touted around the institutional roles of family; of the experiences of motherhood, fatherhood and childhood, most often attempt to preclude those questions or observations which might challenge them.
Framed within sentimentality and much religious moralising, the complex range of experiences that people endure relating to reproductivity – whether as a product thereof, in childhood, or in contending with one’s own potential to reproduce – are mostly referred to evasively and with extreme awkwardness.
Pregnancy is spoken about in terms of fruitfulness and multiplication. But the fact of sexuality in that cycle is conveniently ignored. Also, the incapacity to reproduce is generally avoided or shunned. Bringing Up Baby, currently on show at the Castle, sets out to re-think those ”conventional representations of birth, pregnancy, infertility, motherhood, fatherhood, and childhood”. And it manages to do this in some very beautiful, thoughtful, profound and eloquent ways.
Curiously, it is ideas around sound, or the lack thereof, that resonate in my thoughts and impressions of this exhibition. That is, I am struck by the ways in which sound, as a literal device and as a concept, infiltrates the complex domains constructed by the exhibition.
It is about sound as a sensual experience, but also relates to the idea of being able to sound or find a voice in declaration of one’s existence and experiences. Or, conversely, the inability to make oneself heard. A number of the artists have employed powerful soundtracks developing a dense conflation of sounds that are impossible to confine to an individual artwork. Setting a rather cunning precedent, this sound invasion disrupts the sanctity of the separate pieces.
They filter and echo through the spaces, together with the ambient layers that this venue generates ordinarily.
Terry Kurgan’s photographs of mothers and mothers-to-be, which she collected over a period of about five months in maternity wards, midwife and obstetric units, antenatal clinics and neonatal intensive care units, sensitively explore and expose other realities of Having Babies.
A soundtrack of soundbites from conversations and comments by women about their experiences of birth and pregnancy, and fantasies of motherhood, gently disrupt and unravel the quiet, idyllic intimacies and images of new motherhood which some of the photographs uphold.
This subtle disruption happens in ways not unlike the piercing cry which shatters the quiet serenity of the traditional mother and child motif. Or, perhaps that cry first belonged to the mother, expressing the agony of her childbirth. Or, the sanctity of the image was marred even before that, with the intrusion of blood and bodily substance staining the moment.
The soundtrack, engineered by Warrick Sony, offers ironic repetitions and combinations of ”I’d just love to have a baby,” to ”and then the pain starts to be more”; ”it’s always like ‘what a cute baby,’ it’s never like ‘wow, what a cute mom,”’; ”I’d just love to have a baby”; ”there’s such a lot of pressure on women not to receive painkillers”; ”I had miscarried”.
Penny Siopis’s video, Breasts, sensuously plays with the iconic images of breasts as biblical, nurturant, pure, sensual, mutilated, and contaminated, and, by extension, with the imaging of women in all of these guises. The contradictions invoked are made progressively acute in accompaniment with the Catholic chant that infuses the space.
The exhibition features an intensely considered and satisfying combination of artworks which engage the subject, not all of which I have been able to mention. One which frustrated, however, was Veronique Malherbe’s beautifully conceived, Preserving Purity, which, in its realisation, however, does not seem to emerge far beyond its narcissism.
Bringing Up Baby is on exhibition at The Castle, B- Block Cape Town until September 12
@Loving the nightlife
Peter Frost On stage in Cape Town
It was not cool to love retro-shows. Under no circumstances. Deeply suburban, embarrassingly un-hip. Men in polyester slacks, women having big hair days, all pointing to the ceiling spilling their rum and cokes to a passable tune now slaughtered by a band who’d rather be asleep. But two lads from the birth side of 40 changed all that – and retro has never been the same. Praise the Pope.
Charl-Johan Lingenfelder and Fred Abrahamse’s Abba-ish started out as a way to capture the huge retro market without entirely flushing their reputations down the bog. The show, divided into standard and twisted acts, featured first a darling little tribute to the naff icons of the Eighties, untouched but subtly sent up and then a club full of fresh, slaughterhouse interpretations of standards that made the eyes water before they popped out.
Costumes were as contrasting as the styles – period then S&M – as was lighting, staging and presence. What Pierre Neethling did to Gimme Gimme (a Man After Midnight) is still talked about.
In the midst of all the success, the men in suits pulled the plug. Fred and company got into trouble with the Abba police, appalled by the brutal perversions of the second act. (Rumour has it though that the reason had more to do with the fact that Abba might be planning something similar themselves).
The show, then touring Gauteng, closed overnight. But the point had been made. Previous decades offered modern composers something tangible, and staging could be fresh, imaginative, new.
Now the lads, using the same team of Heinrich Reisenhofer, Amanda Tiffin, Pierre Neethling and Christine Weir continue their assault on the retro-show territory with DISCOvery, their latest offering at On Broadway in Green Point. It takes up where Abba-ish left off, only this time the boys broaden their horizons and target the entire disco movement.
The structure is the same – faithful first act, perverted second – with the Bee Gees featuring strongly. The initial overall concept -that all this is re- enacted by aliens – is followed through too. The set is much more adventurous (Close Encounters meets Aliens) as is lighting and costuming.
The first act doesn’t quite have the squeal factor Abb-ish managed, but the songs are stronger, the interpretations better and the feel-good factor is acid trippy high. The highlight without a doubt is Heinrich Reisenhofer’s pumping You Should Be Dancing. Man, polyester never looked so good. Truly magical. Le Freak, Disco Inferno and Staying Alive delivered soooul sensations while Amanda Tiffin schmaltzed expertly through Yes Sir, I Can Boogie with Reisenhofer reminding us just exactly why lounge lizards were called lounge lizards.
You could almost see his mood ring turning pink. But once again, it’s the second act that astonishes. Who but Lingenfelder would think to do The Three Degrees’s When Will I See You Again? a la Alanis Morrisette, peering morosely into a mirror ball? Or I Will Survive in a strip bar half way between En Vogue and Showgirls?
When Reisenhofer started his unique babble-rap, who realised it was the start of a fabulous YMCA? The best noise however, was produced by Christine Weir’s funk-techno pairing of Yvonne Elleman’s If I Can’t Have You and a brilliant I Love The Nightlife, sounding more like the Priscilla, Queen of the Desert version than Alicia Bridges’ original.
Lingenfelder has been more careful this time, but it doesn’t show, thank God. If the structures of the songs have remained true, his trademark tweaks are all there. As the quartet break into their Ring My Bell encore, it occurs to you that these testosterone versions naturally flow from disco. Natch; after all, what’s techno, hip hop, grind, even grunge if not simply sodomised disco? Yeah right .
DISCOvery can be seen at On Broadway, Somerset Road, Green Point, Cape Town. Tel (021) 418-8338