Alex Dodd
For a city as untamed as Johannesburg you’d expect a little more edge on the underground. A few less galleries, more factories. Fewer townhouse complexes, more warehouses. Jo’burg’s mercurial infrastructure seems like an invitation to artists to go for the spaces between the lines and occupy territory that cannot be easily named and pinned down in the A to Z.
Yet despite the hard-edged entropy of the place, it seems that contemporary fine art only gets taken seriously if it happens within the white-walled confines of certain selected galleries. If there isn’t a glossy invite with sans serif typeface aping spots like London’s Institute of Contemporary Art then the work isn’t worth risking your life at three robots for. As for the commission that gets whacked off every sold work before the cash even lands in the turps- sodden hands of the poor artist – let’s not even go there.
Yet some artists are still up to fighting the big fight – showing a finger to the gallery-or-bust ethic and doing it for themselves. Take Sudden Beauty, a joint photographic show featuring the works of John Hodgkiss, Caroline Suzman and Mark Erasmus. When the show opened last Wednesday night a healthy assortment of Jo’burg types of all ages and leanings flocked into Hodgkiss’s front rooms and lounge. The place was filled to capacity with people and images. The booze was in the kitchen and the band, Abafana Bakwa Zulu, struck up some sounds on the stoep. There was no haughty air of reservation, no us and them art world politics. All three artists milled among the audience indulging in philosophical ramblings with the drinkers of the wine.
Complementing the freshness of the venue was the air of defiance that stemmed from the work itself. Hodgkiss, for starters, has never been one to toe the line. The world’s rules and Hodgkiss’s rules emanate from two distinct bibles. His work, going as Once in a Lifecycle, is stubbornly quirky expressing a general disappointment in humanity’s common tendencies, a kind of frustration with the impulse towards hegemony and decency.
Take, for example, True Romance Seven Days a Week. The first image in the sequence Part One, Off the Peg II, features the chalk line marking where the corpse lay. In the sequence the icon of death is progressively superimposed by a suit and tie. No human in the suit and tie – just the uniform. By the final image the suit and tie is the only thing visible pointing to a kind of death in conformity. This is also expressed in Hodgkiss’s juxtaposition of classical forms with primitive iconography -the plinth and the baboon, the marble statues that are broken into pieces.
Somehow, though, the real power seems to lie in Hodgkiss’s less polemical works, the most unforgettable of which is a piece called Gauteng Red. This work almost literally vibrates with a kind of digital, urban energy. Superimposed over an image of traffic and driven people in suits are hundreds of tiny red dots of light like the compound eye of a fly or the micro- mechanism of a traffic light.
Erasmus’s photography is similarly conceptual, but less polemical. The point is never too clear in his images. The sense is deeply obfuscated and yet one is drawn to them – drawn by hints of wholeness and red herrings into a broken world where nothing comes together. Most of Erasmus’s images are polaroids – temporal and incidental. Entitled Catastrophe of the Ordinary, his landscape is ill-defined – a kind of urban wasteland filled with tar and blood stains and road signs leading to nowhere.
A yield sign has as little meaning in one image as the Japanese graffiti in another. They’re all just there to tempt you inwards into a world that is more concerned with textures and physical boundaries, than conclusions and answers.
Suzman’s take is something of a departure from the other work on show. Her work is less easy to classify in terms of the line between conceptual/art photography and social documentary.
Certainly her work is located more in the objective universe reflected in newspapers every day, but her heart takes her beyond surfaces and facts into the emotional or spiritual realm of the people she photographs.
Her subjects are newspaper subjects rescued from objectification: beauty queens after the show; the backstage disappointment of the potential Miss South Africas never crowned; the layers and layers of make-up on a drag queen on the other side of youth’s divine spotlight. And yet people’s fallibility is viewed with a kindness and resignation that is redemptive for viewer and subject alike.
Suzman’s show is aptly named God Atoms, for in each image – whether it be in the totality of love and pain in a woman giving birth or the clumsy smile of the Asylum Child – she captures her subject in a moment of tangible, often awkward truth.
Sudden Beauty is on show at 57 Auckland Avenue, Auckland Park until September 11