Food and Fine Art
Andrew Putter
Long Life is the new ramen bar under the Lounge in Long Street. Elegantly occupying a space which once housed the infamous Mau Mau artsite, it’s a narrow, high-ceilinged galley, minimally furnished with wood-slatted benches and a trendy front door. It’s exotic (ice with the Chinese beer), and the music’s good (from Ernest Ranglin to Dead Can Dance). Food is cheap, nourishing and tasty, comes in a bowl with chopsticks, and you get enough to satisfy the 19h00 munchies.
One friend who’s a ramen aficionado said his meal wasn’t brilliant, but he stayed in London and lived on ramen, and everyone knows familiarity makes you jaded. (Ramen, in case you didn’t know, is the generic word for an oriental noodle).
Although the service and space are sometimes a little too cool, what the place lacks in warmth it makes up for in consumables. There are magazines to read while waiting for nosh, and the walls are used as an exhibition space.
There’s something reassuringly chic about a noodle bar boasting an exhibition of photographs halfway between gritty sleaze and commercial slick. The sensation of Jillian Lochner’s new show is undoubtedly a work called Dennis, mysteriously concealed behind a specially made cloth, painted with the sign: View on Request. It’s a large, painstakingly-printed, shockingly detailed, full-frontal portrait of a fanny. And no common-or-garden variety either. This one’s been pierced to hell and back, the labia stretched open with sleepers, like curtains on a glistening stage.
Dennis brought to mind that classic line from Nicholas Roeg’s film Insignificance. The fan operator beneath Marilyn Monroe’s famously billowing skirt describes the view up between the icon’s legs as “the face of God”. Dennis is like that. Hidden in a way reminiscent of something sacred, the image turns out to be one of the most profane in male-dominated Western European culture. Nice twist.
In the programme notes, Lochner describes how this intriguing show came about. In 1992 she left Cape Town for England with 50 in her pocket. Two lean weeks of unsuccessful job hunting later, she applied for a position advertised as “Receptionist at a Night Club”. Little did she know that the next few years would be spent on the door of a Soho sex club, eventually befriending and photographing its employees and clientele. She writes that this period was a “difficult yet influential” one. The reason for showing some of the work from this time is that it allows insight into her present work.
Lochner is perhaps best known as the photographer for the controversial Musica campaign. It used large-scale images of naked couples to promote Valentine’s Day spending. Lochner includes the photograph of the old couple. Here she makes clear links between the sensitive approach to sexuality and people’s bodies evident in the earlier Soho works, and these more recent commercial pieces.
The Soho works are touching, and hover somewhere between portraiture, documentary and polemic. Images of women abound. Lochner often uses her craft in a way which allows her to highlight her subject’s physical oddities at the same time that she flatters them with careful lighting and romantic posing. The sweetest work is of a woman’s tummy bulging out of her striped corset, her skin rendered like smooth dough.
If Lochner is kind to the women in her pics, she takes revenge on the men. She says that she was frequently threatened by the “upper crust” clients, in the form of lawyers and doctors who led double lives as S&M clubbers. Her images of men tend to stay locked in the stereotype of the dirty old man – though, ironically, the shots of older men engaged in bondage have a a kind of pathos. Most wicked is a long sequence of shots called The Rape of Suzie. Photographed secretly, the series reveals a man humping a blow-up doll. It’s angry, sad and thought-provoking, made more so by a clever title.
Printed in a dark, glossy blue and block- mounted, the work cements Lochner’s reputation as a meticulous and brave photographer.
Long Life is at 192 Long Street, Cape Town. It’s open from 12pm to 12am, except on Saturdays, when it opens for lunch only. Closed on Sundays.