Shaun de Waal
REVIEW OFTHEWEEK
Showing simultaneously at Johannesburg’s Goodman Gallery are two shows by important young South African artists, but beyond that they have little in common: if one expects some kind of dialogue between Lisa Brice’s Work in Transit and Hentie van der Merwe’s ‘Trappings’, one may be left in a state of some puzzlement. The effect is rather like that of having Joseph Cornell and Mark Rothko in the same space.
Brice has a variety of objects and photographs on show, ones displaying her absorbing attention to detail and her sly, sardonic sense of humour. In her Soutpiel series of exit signs – here in the flesh, as it were, as well as in photographs – she takes internationally understood symbols, in the stylised green-and-white format of worldwide usage, and then tweaks and sequences them into mini-narratives of flight from a South Africa driven by crime. The otherwise serene image of an aeroplane taking off acquires new connotations when it is prefaced by muggings and murders. Once you’ve seen Brice’s exit signs, you start noticing exit signs all over the place, from restaurants to airports, and they seem subtly changed, touched with menace.
Her other main series at the Goodman is a witty set of “cocaine drawings”, in which images are composed with coke-like powder on circular mirrors, which are set against the wall on a bracket with light cast on them to reflect the shadowy forms on the wall above. One set represents the hand- gestures of Cape gangs, the other redraws the logos and labels that, taken from the wide world of global consumerism, have now also become symbols of gang affiliation.
The “cocaine drawings” marvellously suggest a whole economy of vice and crime, from the brutal underclass of runners and dealers, appropriating the brands of high capitalism to define gang loyalties, to the high-society consumers of expensive drugs, for whom Nike and Adidas may mean no more than a choice of what to wear to the gym.
Van der Merwe’s work – a group of large colour photographs – is less detailed and more oblique than Brice’s. He has taken pictures of military uniforms, as they are displayed in a museum, but in natural light and with very soft focus, so that many seem to loom out of the frame like headless ghosts of the past. Some of them are reduced to near-abstraction, so that a World War II diving suit looks vaguely like an alien from outer space, or a cluster of medals blurs into something like a bunch of flowers.
These haunting, often very beautiful images continue to explore Van der Merwe’s interest in dehumanisation and the male body. An earlier show of his wallpapered a small room with hundreds of photographs of World War II soldiers, naked and facing the cataloguing camera blankly, specimens in some vast quasi- medical study. They had been as dehumanised by the camera as they would be by the violence of war.
In ‘Trappings’, Van der Merwe has approached the subject from the other end, as it were: this is war all dressed up, flaunting its colours and its decorations. Death, which is after all the soldier’s job, is displaced by lavish peacock-like display. Yet the softness of the images removes the specificity of the uniforms’ meanings, their ranks and so forth, their trappings – and the context of system in which they are trapped. The image of an outfit worn by the shock- troops of 32 Battalion is bizarrely lovely; the battered bush hat could be as old as the Anglo-Boer South African War, and the flowing veil beneath it evokes all sorts of non-military connotations, while also leaving one with the uncomfortable mental picture of a face that has melted away.
Making beautiful objects that speak about complex, often very unlovely, realities is a difficult job, and something of a delicate balancing act. Contradictions are thrown up that may not be easily resolved in the works themselves, and artists have to find ways to hold them in tension without the work falling apart or failing to signify. Both Brice and Van der Merwe manage to walk that tightrope with aplomb.
‘Trappings’ and Work in Transit are showing at the Goodman Gallery on Jan Smuts Avenue in Johannesburg until March 25. For information Tel: (011) 788-1113