Being the kind of person who doesn’t walk under ladders with a whole stack of ease, I’ve got a big problem with the outcomes- based extremity of chain letters. To me they’re generally just an unwanted dose of bad ju-ju. By deleting or ripping the thing into tiny shreds on receipt, I always preclude myself from the happy option of repeating Mr PJ Jones from Illinois’s fabulous (no doubt fabulated) fate – no life-changing millions for me. I then spend the next two weeks anticipating doom. If my car breaks down, my fridge packs in or I am subjected to a lousy date, I figure it has to be cosmic punishment for destroying the unbroken connectivity of the cursed chain letter. Pity those who have fallen from chain letter Eden.
Sunday night’s opening of Unplugged V at the Rembrandt van Rijn Gallery was therefore a welcome inversion of chain letter doom and gloom. Conceived in 1996 as a novel alternative to the didacticism of single-person curatorship, Unplugged turned the chain letter’s outcomes emphasis on its head. There’s no great prize or punishment at the end. One artist nominates another artist who nominates another artist to be part of the show which stands as a celebration of otherwise invisible artistic networks in this country. Lines of creative kinship are rendered tangible to the viewer and the journey becomes the destination.
Ilse Pahl ended up being the artist who linked last year’s show to this year’s so she designed the quietly amusing invitation – a photograph featuring pigeons waddling around on the tarmac over the yellow lines. Creatures who won’t be regulated pictured in relation to lines that shouldn’t be crossed. A subtle meditation on rules and rule- breakers?
But rule-breaking and statement-making does not seem to be the show’s defining agenda. If anything the artists seem to be at pains to have no association whatsoever with the social realism and voice of protest that once defined South African art.
Although widely varied in terms of medium and subject, the works share a tendency towards subtle questioning and introspection rather than statements and conclusions. The tone is quiet and perplexed, sometimes slightly menacing, as in the case of Johan van der Schijff’s Head Spin and Katheryn Smith’s And Then I Missed You. In Smith’s blown-up digital photograph a woman in the foreground peers out at the viewer from behind a door with her digital camera. It is only later that you notice the dead man lying in the corridor at the foot of the blood-stained wall. This grainy cinematic photograph says something about the violence of the visual image, the link between a camera and a weapon. But exactly what it says is not quite clear. It hints and troubles, but doesn’t clearly state.
Van der Schijff’s Head Spin is equally perplexing. On the screen of an Apple Mac a little green head turns round and round and round. As it turns the viewer observes its internal dimensions, which change as the head moves. At times it seems like the skull of an alien – at least the familiar icon, with those distinctively huge eye sockets, which we earthlings commonly denote aliens.
The Apple Mac is linked via red and black wires to a complex circuit board resting on top of a wooden African headrest. So the head is symbolically powered by a host of different media: electricity, digital impulses, magic, ancient knowledge. And with all this it just spins round and round to a disturbing digital soundtrack. That’s the head spin. Not knowing where the human/alien head comes from or where it is going. What is the origin of intelligence and where is it taking us? Perhaps just round and round in circles.
Two the most directly affecting works on the show came in the form of photographs. Santu Mofokeng’s Where Did the Road Lead When It Lead Nowhere? is a bleak image of a factory ground or industrial wasteland that struck me instantly as a kind of concentration camp. A light shines from the observation tower in the misty dawn or dusk, almost brighter than the moon obscured by mist and clouds. The skeletal tree is echoed in the form of a barbed wire fence. In the face of this institutionalised bleakness, hope seems like a devastatingly fragile thing.
In Dusk Anton Karstel captures a particular group of rooftops bathed in that poignantly transient golden light that disappears when night falls. At first I only noticed the star and crescent atop the minaret, but then it struck me that there was a cross at the top of a church steeple on the other side of the image. Islam and Christianity caught in the same holy light. Coincidently or not, between the two houses of worship – the two different faiths – run telephone wires, the medium of communication. How successfully are the two faiths communicating in Cape Town? The pigeon perched on the side of a roof doesn’t seem to care. But the image houses many powerful icons: the bird, the mosque, the church, the palm tree, the moon – all bathed in the golden light of dusk.
Claudette Schreuders’s Burnt by the Sun is another work that stays. The little white girl in her white nightie is carved from pale blonde wood. From a distance it looks like she is wearing pink rubber gloves. The inexplicable incongruity of rubber gloves and white nightdress is very disturbing from afar. But, on closer inspection, you realise she isn’t wearing rubber gloves at all. She has been burnt by the sun. It is her flesh that is pink and tender. Her little white European arms have been damaged by the harsh rays of the African sun. Her body wasn’t made for this climate.
There are many other works worthy of attention, but the act that stole the show on opening night was Elma van Rooyen’s bold and daring geisha performance piece. Installed in the gallery is a wooden dressing table housing the requisite make-up, a contemporary shocking-pink designer dress hanging on glistening chords of fishing wire and a video monitor. In front of the dressing table is giant white heart cut out of white powder.
Enter Van Rooyen with her perfect young body and perfect unblemished face – her perfect hair in a neat hair net. Her perfect breasts in a pink bodice that matches the pink designer dress. She is wearing full white panties like a schoolgirl and slowly approaches the dressing table where she proceeds to apply make-up in a painstakingly calculated fashion. Her expression is blank as she makes the fastidious markings on her face with the white base, white powder, black kohl eyeliner, red lipstick.
An eternity of minutes elapses before she dons the sharply cut black wig and snips the fishing wire to slip into the pink dress. How many precise actions before she eventually begins twirling her black umbrella? One is struck by the sheer amount of time and effort that goes into all this calculated beautification. To what end? Fuelled by what? Sheer desire? Determination to be admired and loved as the most perfect geisha girl in town? Surely such expectation can only end in tears. On the video monitor, the zip is undone, the breasts are touched, the make-up is smudged and mascara stained tears run down perfect white cheeks. “Love” say the decorative letters submerged in water. “Love.” “Love/Love.” “Love.”
“Christ it’s hot in here,” comments a male friend seconds after Van Rooyen has switched off the video machine and taken her bows. And I agree the temperature in the gallery is definitely up. There is no doubt the piece was brave, erotic and beautiful. I’m just not sure how deep it was.
Unplugged V is on at the Rembrandt van Rijn Gallery in Newtown, Johannesburg, until March 4. For more information Tel: (011) 832-1641