Performance is out and video is in at this year’s Vita Art Prize exhibition, writes Lauren Shantall
While last year’s prestigious award was nabbed by the bodily adventurous Steven Cohen, this year’s nominees are exhibitionists in the strictly traditional sense. Three of the six artists have submitted trendy videos, exhibited alongside a sculptural installation, photographs and paintings at the Sandton Civic Gallery.
Zwelethu Mthethwa’s photographic series A Black Man and Masculinity consists of rose- tinted prints on canvas. Pretty in traditionally “feminine” pink (an effete, perhaps clichd comment on the way our society constructs binary notions of gender), the series is both a departure from and an affirmation of Mthethwa’s established photographic technique.
His signature use of vibrant, energetic colour, much in evidence in his pastel work and his photographs of township dwellings and their inhabitants, is here replaced by less varied, flatter pinks and deep browns. Mthethwa’s work becomes interesting when one considers the politics of representation which underlie his project.
Operating self-consciously as a black photographer, the photographs – which show two men kissing, a father holding a child, a butcher operating as a street vendor, a labourer and so forth – explore the social typing of black men. But by focusing on one particular social stratum, one to which he does not belong himself, Mthethwa limits the validity of his exploration of black masculinity.
But there is one exception. A black male model for Revlon cosmetics gazes sensuously out of the frame of a poster adorning the wall of a hair salon and provides a focal point. Below this advert imaging a certain kind of masculinity, a woman is having her hair washed in a sink. This work stands out as a complex, more nuanced negotiation of the gendered terrain.
Because they are so very different in their intentions, it is difficult to ignore the dialogue that Mthethwa’s series sets up with Vita winner Jo Ractliffe’s video installation, loosely titled Love, Death, Sacrifice and so forth. Four video screens, mounted horizontally on a black wall, set up an elusive non-narrative. Four distinct image strands show fingers brushing over the scar tissue of a healing wound, an aerial shot of the sky from the window of an aeroplane, a dog digging up soil, and a pulpy, fleshy flatworm threaded on to a hook and line. These play across the screens, flicking from one to the other, subverting any attempt to read a narrative.
Equally powerful is the second of three video installations – Minnette Vri’s radical adventure into the realm of media spectacle. Three video screens mounted one above the other show a naked, cleanly shaven Vri adopting various menacing poses. Sometimes she is crouching, sometimes standing, while leering aggressively at the viewer and rapaciously devouring what appears to be a lump of flesh.
But this is another of Vri’s magnificently disturbing forays into digital technology, and in place of flesh one sees manipulated footage of rapidly changing clips taken from television news programmes. These news clips are also visible behind the Vri figure.
Like a malevolent golem, a creature summoned by our excesses, Vri is seen to be literally consuming the news, in a pointed comment on our relationship to media events. Enhanced by a strident soundtrack looping distortions and snatches of news titling sequences, it’s a gripping, confrontational piece.
The third video installation, White Man’s Burden by Kendell Geers, explores the mechanisms of white guilt, confession and judgment by a higher authority – conveniently coinciding with the most recent, high-profile amnesty granting by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Geers has stolen a single scene from the film The Bad Lieutenant in which the lead actor, Harvey Keitel, is pictured in front of a church altar confessing his sins. Phrases like “I’ve been so horrible” and “Forgive me” are distorted slightly, the pitch raised, and played at distressingly high volume while the scene repeats endlessly on a two-sided screen reaching about 60cm up from the floor.
Geers’s side of his collaboration with Bili Bidjocka at the 1998 Grahamstown festival was mounted in almost exactly the same way. There the artist displayed a looped scene from Heart of Darkness in a darkened room, and in comparison White Man’s Burden seems burdensomely familiar. Geers is usually celebrated, or contested, for his ability to extend notions of what can be considered art. But here one wonders if he has really extended himself.
In many ways, the work does not excite. Although White Man’s Burden does have immediate and undeniable relevance to South Africa, Geers, who has traded on the territory of the big bad whitey for quite some time now, continues to do so in disappointingly repetitive terms.
Much-respected painter and former Vita winner Robert Hodgins’s mixed-media work, A Tailor’s Shop in Cairo, featuring a man in a pin-striped suit, combines cubist-style collage with almost garish expressionist colour. Brushwork is blended with magazine cutouts and an incorporated text quote which reads “leader in men’s and boys’ quality fashion wear”.
Despite the titular exoticism, this riotously bright, appealingly whimsical work focuses on the everyday. At the same time one cannot miss the interest in the vagaries of fashion and the global persistence of commercial culture. Hodgins continues to impress with his willingness to explore new ground.
Rising star Isaac Nkosinathi Khanyile’s installation reworks and recontextualises the methods of traditional African art, heating up the art versus craft debate in the process.
Carefully positioned clay pots, each holding a different medicinal herb, rest on three strips of parallel woven straw matting on the gallery floor. Each pot bears a label, rendered in beadwork. A central totemic clay figure, resembling an all-knowing sangoma, presides over the collection.
The work entices participation, and one is forced to engage with its spatial dimensions in order to peruse and ponder the contents of each vessel. Yet it also appears to offer healing. The piece is a fresh, thought-provoking fusion of traditions, both European and African.
The 1999 FNB Vita art prize exhibition runs at the Sandton Civic gallery until September 11. Visit ZA@Play’s special FNB Vita Art Prize website at www.mg.co.za/mg/art/vita/