Anton Karstel’s Pol- aesthetic is an ambitious exploration of formal, aesthetic, spatial and temporal contingencies. The exhibition’s title puns tenuously on the aesthetic dimensions of socially and politically loaded iconography: the markings on police vehicles.
These vehicles are represented through the “initial” spatio-temporal zone of this exhibition: the gallery space of Johannesburg’s Civic Theatre. Relinquishing control over photographic composition (shutter release, depth of field, etcetera), Karstel has taken shots of non-functional police vehicles in a Pretoria junkyard lot, cropping the enlarged shots afterwards in careful accord with an aestheticised rectangular plane.
The second component of the show, which opened after the Civic exhibition and closes before, is an exhibition of oil paintings at the Karen McKerron Gallery in Bryanston. Referencing and re- representing the photographs, the paintings underline the tension between a highly formalised and beautifully accomplished art form in a traditional space, and the socio-political “aesthetics” of vehicles of control.
Finally, for the duration of the show, Karstel is screening projected video works – of urban marches and moving police vehicles shot in the style of the frontline news reporter – in public spaces in Johannesburg.
Karstel’s highly deliberate reflections on the historical and ideological place/space of painting are clever and interesting, and the exhibition at McKerron is really the conceptual fulcrum of the show. There is something moving and unnerving about these objects at their second aesthetic remove: lovingly revisited in a traditional medium that here takes its cue from photography that falls between the documentary and “artistic”.
But as a conceptual and visual whole, Pol-aesthetic is as difficult to appreciate as it is to describe. Karstel’s basic premise is strong, and would, I suspect, have been stronger without the trendy multimedia trappings, the multiple locations and serial “exhibits”. At a time when video – and the full multimedia “apparatus” – are deployed by artists with gung-ho millennial abandon, a bit of conceptual cropping is increasingly welcome.