Maybe it’s just that I was sore because she didn’t ask me for a contribution, but I expected to find excessive and gratuitous use of bodily fluids in Veronique Malherbe’s exhibition, The Quest for Zero Defect, at the Joo Ferreira Fine Art gallery. Rumours and publicity about chocolate made from breast milk and a halo made of semen had been circulating long enough to ensure a certain amount of anticipation.
A hundred men had been asked by Veronique Malherbe for a small contribution of seed. Men not selected greeted their exclusion with a mixture of relief and perhaps a little jealousy. This is vital stuff. The breast milk was Malherbe’s own which she had been expressing and freezing for some time. The local section of a Sunday rag carried a front page article on this, and on the day of the opening the gallery was flooded by enquiries from people clearly not accustomed to visiting art exhibitions.
It came therefore as a surprise that the two potentially controversial works on the show are fairly quiet and mildly amusing. They don’t seem to be an axis along which the exhibition is organised and don’t seem intentionally offensive.
The show, which includes collaborations with artists and non-artists alike, such as writer Ashraf Jamal and electronic music outfit RAM, seems to be without big statements and dogmatic assertions.
The persona of Malherbe is central to most works, but she appears curious and enquiring rather than emphatic and egoistic. She is an observer, often party to the action, not drawing too many conclusions, just presenting the results for analysis.
Malherbe enjoys determining the conditions and apparatus to be used and then letting her experiment unfold. Much of her work here comprises small units, collected and compiled for scrutiny.
Sperm Halo consists of semen-filled test tubes hung in a circle, illuminated by circular flourescent lights. This is presented along with an explanation of the process of selection and collection along with photographs of several of the subjects. The samples seem rather forlorn, curdling under flourescent pallor, rescued perhaps by glitter and dye which some people were moved to include with their contribution. The halo sits between an act of control by Malherbe and an act of machismo by her contributors.
Her criterion for selection of donors was creativity. Perhaps that could have been ”procreativity” and, as such, the work examines the idea of partner selection and the transmission of genetic information. Again the results are presented, but no conclusion is drawn. This work is discreet, methodical and even charming.
The exhibition includes a painting, prints, a dice game, an exercise bike and a roundabout, and each could merit similar attention. Viewers spend a lot of time with the work and this is not often achieved by an artist. You don’t leave feeling you have missed out on something or that you didn’t quite get it.
The show is accessible and enjoyable. This is not to suggest that Malherbe is not serious about her pursuit. She is relentless, even ruthless, and her methodology is carefully designed.
Although her presentation is sometimes lacking, her poetry a bit dodgy, and the gallery seems cluttered, this is a show with a lot of substance. Malherbe addresses themes of intimacy, motherhood, genetic inheritance and partner selection among others, and these are things of which we all have some experience.
She presents her experiences and ours and measures them up like a kind of quasi- scientist. But one who seems a little more interested in her subjects, experiments and laboratory than she is in the biology itself.
The exhibition is on at Joo Ferreira Fine Art, 80 Hout Street, Cape Town until May 29