Decamped to Durban for the first time in its history is the FNB Vita Art Prize exhibition, which houses the work of its six young charges in the distinguished NSA Gallery.
Having selected half a dozen of South Africa’s pre-eminent contemporary artists, the sponsor gave each R12 000 to create a new work upon which they would be judged.
The result is as good a thumbnail sketch of the state of contemporary South African art as any you’re likely to find in a formal gallery context. The first work that confronts one is Kim Lieberman’s deceptively bland arrangements of postage stamps, thread, oil paint and digital projection. Yet, upon inspection, the intricacy of her work adds to its conceptual magnitude. Lieberman’s opus is a refreshing anomaly in the age of hyperreality and supersensory ultramediation.
Across the way is Clive van den Berg’s Love’s Ballast, the site of a remarkable coupling of the abstract and representational, which has each struggling for supremacy in dramatic and dispassionate fashion. This is due in part to the glare and heat of its battery of light bulbs, softened only by some doodles on fabric and stone and crowned by a floating wooden bed, the symbol of everything from birth to lust to rest and death.
Around the corner, ensconced in a separate chamber that she has turned into an air-lock, is Kathryn Smith’s intense and frightening The Way We Kiss in Public/ADASTW.
The self-enclosed space is a barrage of twitching, stuttering video and sound jangling the senses, yet these are confused by the corruption of the familiar environment — the floors have been covered with aluminium sheeting, the air is ice-cold and the walls emit an otherworldly glow. Yet another meditation on the mind-scrambling mechanisms of mediation, which evokes U2’s line “You miss too much these days if you stop to think.”
The work evokes Ian McEwan’s novel The Cement Garden, where the kids forsaken by the death of their parents bury the corpse of their mother in a steel locker filled with wet cement to avoid being placed in an orphanage. Weeks after the cement has hardened, it cracks and begins to emit a terrible stench. In Smith’s installation the television and the hi-fi have taken the place of the mother.
Upstairs, directly above Smith’s work, is Jan van der Merwe’s melancholy — yet strangely unsentimental — installation Baggage Arrival. Here the artist occupies himself with the forces of material decay and corporeal corrosion. A clunking, rusted baggage carousel revolves its forgotten cargo between human and clinical-camera eye, a forlorn trolley alongside waiting in vain to be pushed once again.
Overlooking the gallery from the mezzanine is Moshekwa Langa’s Home Movies: Where Do I Begin? A trio of video loops of home movies is accompanied by the nostalgic strains of Shirley Bassey’s song of the same name. Though the work has a kind of whimsical, offhanded quality, to my mind it is more of an afterthought of postmodernism’s open-endedness rather than something possessing the kind of intellectual rigour I would imagine of winning work. Yet Langa is this year’s recipient of the FNB Vita Art Prize.
Maybe it is precisely his refusal, or reluctance, to provide the grammar and punctuation of his signature narrative of identity-formation that impressed the judges. Perhaps they viewed the flippancy of his work as a challenge to traditional ideas of what constitutes a serious work of art.
Absent from the sanctified space of the gallery is Robin Rhodes’s work, a performance that took place in Durban’s Warwick Triangle a few days before the formal exhibition opened. Rhodes gets my vote simply for having the balls to have made his R12 000 work of art by taking the judges to the city’s busiest taxi rank and simulating a vehicle-cleaning by washing chalk lines off the road and painting shoe polish on invisible tyres.
The FNB Vita Art Prize exhibition runs until September 9 at the NSA Gallery in Durban.