When I first walk into the Association for Visual Arts, primed to review Medina Morphet’s exhibition of abstract art, it’s disconcerting to first encounter the illustrative drawings of Bongi Bengu. There also seem to be two distinct crowds here tonight, a relatively bourgeois, middle class crowd who are attracted to Bengu’s narrative depiction, and a more hip, fashionable group chatting knowledgeably about Morphet’s compositions.
This is strangely ironic, as you’d expect the second group to be the sort of PC viewers who would gravitate towards Bengu’s portrayals of women in South Africa, and the more staid group to be more comfortable in the historically based practice of abstraction.
However, art is often about subversion, and Morphet’s cynical, funny take on the abstract tradition appeals to those who love deconstructing the sacred. By the end of the evening, the two groups are mingling, encouraged by wine at R1 a glass. This is the advantage of the AVA’s three distinct gallery spaces, which expose people to art they wouldn’t normally go to see.
Incredibly, a woman viewing Morphet’s art utters that well worn, defensive derogatory phrase: “My child could do this”. This very clearly doesn’t apply here. These works present us with a sophisticated, dense understanding of paint and the surface which it covers. This understanding is not illustrated by abstract art’s traditional enjoyment of the character of paint itself, but rather by a stylisation of the products of experimentation which took place in the Sixties and Seventies, which characterised Morphet’s earlier work.
In an attack which traditionalists would see as sacrilegious, but which I would rather see as a celebration, the artist sweeps over various ways of painting which made up part of the development of modernism. Runs, blobs, scratches, splattering and dripping are simplified to humorous pop-like flat reproduction. Jean Arp-like, amorphic shapes are stenciled on to the canvas, and references to his Navel paintings abound.
But don’t be put off by all this jargon. Morphet’s art doesn’t rely on the bland recalling of “isms”. Like all good art, her work has the ability to communicate on many levels. Her whimsical conjunctions of shapes and space will allow viewers to impose their own meanings: candy floss at funfairs, your first view from an aeroplane, your first attempt at painting.
If you’ve visited one of the international collections of modern art, you’ll remember the awesome scale of this kind of painting. Morphet has chosen a small, more domestic scale, challenging the presumed monumentality so often attributed to this art tradition and, in so doing, the exhibition hangs more effectively. She has subverted the canons of abstraction by not taking the “artwork” too seriously. The titles such as Red End joke at the pretentious seriousness of the Zen-like names normally attached to abstract works. You wonder whether Beauty Spot describes the brown spot separate from all the other coloured shapes on this white canvas, or if it is a description of the act of looking. Perhaps it is the field one is regarding – the painting as arena for the contemplation and debate of beauty.
Morphet seems to be playing a tenuous game in her stylisation of brush and paint, as she could be seen to be criticising the simplicity of the experiments of abstraction, which are her main source of material. Seen this way, you might think she stands the danger of the parasitical plant that kills its host and in so doing threatens its own survival. Morphet has calculated it in a different way though: she is celebrating in that history but refusing to be suffocated by it. Through a disrespect of tradition this exhibition reinforces the development of personal choice in art, freeing anything which might have reached an establishment acceptance from falling into a 19th century academy.