Sue Williamson
Art Dialogue is yet another initiative which had its germination in the Second Johannesburg Biennale in 1997. (A point worth making to all those with cultural money to allocate who consider biennales a waste of time and money).
Ralph Seippel, who shows young international artists in his Cologne gallery, came to Johannesburg for the biennale and looked at what was around: liked Kevin Brand’s work on the fringe biennale show Smokkel; met Johannesburg artist and curator David Koloane and invited him back to Cologne, where Koloane looked at maybe 50 artists in a two-week trip. The result is this show in Block B in the Cape Town Castle to be followed by a show in Germany.
The curator’s intention was to give exposure mainly to German and South African artists that are not so well known. Not a huge show, but ”a little drop on a hot stone”, as curatorial consultant Beate Baethke puts it.
The title, Art Dialogue, is not particularly enticing, suggesting as it does a certain measure of political correctness, the building of cultural bridges, a careful exchange of ideas. Nonetheless, it is a solid show in which the 10 artists are basically concerned with an end of the millennium reconfiguration of the traditional studio techniques of painting, sculpture and photography.
The best known of the South African artists, Kevin Brand, continues to apply the thinking of a sculptor to his image making. Bless My World is composed of two mounted cutouts in which the images are built up by blocks of small ”postage stamps” in tones of white, black or grey, with a restrained amount of hand tinting, a sort of ”pixel” technique of representation. The head and shoulders of a small boy are upturned towards a car. Each of the stamps which make up the images is printed with the image of Oliver Twist, arm upstretched, asking for more – a symbol of the way Brand feels about the mood of this country. Oliver is also the name of Brand’s son, and the Fifties car at which he is gazing is a car which Brand himself once coveted. But one does not need to know any of this to enjoy the piece for its formal qualities.
Both the young Gauteng sculptors, Aaron Pitso Chinzima and Abel Tshidiso Makhetha, weld scrap metal and found objects to forcefully express their ideas. ”The physical process of producing the work is more important than the final product,” says Makhetha, ”but Endangered Species is my main theme, and therefore I depict animals in their natural environment.” Makhetha’s three-part piece, Afterbirth, shows a female animal, a goat, perhaps, weak, vulnerable, having just given birth, with a male standing protectively by and the newborn baby lying on the ground.
The most conceptual of the artists on show is Hermann J Kassel, whose concern is with the power of natural processes. Kassel encloses wet earth dug from the forest floor in airtight steel and glass blocks, thus providing a microhabitat in which the decay of forest materials can continue, mosses can grow. A sort of combination of art and science.
In earlier outdoor installation works, the artist constructed large structures of glass blocks and harnessed solar energy so that the structures would emanate their own light at night. A statuesque but hacked down tree in the forest inspired Kassel to weld rods to make a support for the remaining trunk – an exercise which led to Group of Trees, on show at the Castle, a powerful comment on man’s decimation of the forests.
Conny Siemsen abandons the chisel for a chainsaw, working at both the inside and outside of her limewood Facial Fragments, the lower halves of giant faces, so that a thin ”skin” is left, a structure which almost seems to have been peeled off an original rather than hewn, thus achieving work that is at once monumental and delicate. Siemsen chooses limewood for its ”pale colour, its tendency for faultiness” giving the fragments ”a ghostly and bloodless appearance”. Curator Koloane says that when he first saw Siemsen’s work in Germany, he was put in mind of work he had seen in Venda.
David Hockney tried to extend the real time of a photograph by taking dozens of shots of the same subject, and collaging them. Michael Wesely approaches the same problem differently: using a pinhole camera with density reducing filters, Wesely opens his lens and leaves the camera there – for hours, days, even a year. The result is images imprinted with the events of time passing, tulips in a vase growing longer, then dying back; a railway station at rush hour in which only the motion of trains can be seen – the people moved too fast to be imprinted.
Others on the show are painters Eckhard Etzold, Thomas Arnim Reddig and Garth Erasmus and photographer Andrew Tshabangu.
On until June 5 at the Cape Town Castle