Art pick of the week
João Ferreira Fine Art: Until December 1
I am lucky enough to own a piece by Paul Edmunds. It’s called Cardinal, and it’s a sphere made entirely out of silver pins, stuck into each other in layers.
It’s gorgeous, fastidious and wildly improbable. It also brings enormous pleasure to whoever looks at it, a pleasure that’s tinged with sadness.
The whole thing teeters precariously between extreme fragility and absurd defiance, beauty that exists in contradiction of natural laws. Edmunds’s new show should be something like that. There’s a big installation made of recycled polystyrene cups, into which Edmunds has cut around 72 000 arrow shapes. Let me put that in words: seventy-two thousand. Who said there weren’t any insane artists left in the world?
There are also three heavy bronzes on show, created around polystyrene punnets.
Bronzes made from polystyrene? I know, it all sounds utterly paradoxical, but that’s Edmunds’s work for you. He uses recycled materials, and transforms then into objects of incredible beauty.
This stuff on show is virtually indescribable, so go and have a look for yourself. It’s guaranteed to make you see the world with different, happier eyes. — Chris Roper
Theatre pick of the week
Breasts: A Play about Men: Sanlam Studio Theatre, Baxter Theatre Centre – Until November 24
Versatile actor-writer Greig Coetzee is busy in Cape Town this month. Besides mounting his one-man presentations White Men with Weapons and Breasts (with the latter currently on at the Baxter), he’s directed another KwaZulu-Natal native, Ben Voss, in a play called Men’s Night, which finished its run as part of the Collaborations 2001 programme at Artscape.
The thematic terrain and format of these plays is almost identical. In each case the actor plays a range of recognisably white, heterosexual, male characters dealing with the stress of change in South Africa now. White Men with Weapons is Coetzee’s much-travelled and brilliantly observed take on the old South African Defence Force. In Breasts and Men’s Night, the characters portrayed are up-to-date, youngish Anglo-Durbanites of different classes.
That both Voss and Coetzee have drawn their characters from so narrow a social band is the most interesting aspect of both plays.
It’s an intriguing challenge for an actor to wring variety out of quite samey sorts of people, and Coetzee in particular scores for achieving distinctiveness with few props and little vocal difference. He is an assured actor of great verve, whose grasp of the personae here is deft and detailed.
That, I’m afraid, is where the interest in both plays stops — and it has to be said that Voss’s characterisations are less varied and interesting than Coetzee’s. I, for one, am very tired of hearing white, male heterosexuals bemoaning their lack of influence, power, status and more in 21st-century South Africa. Really, white males did have it rather good for rather long, and whingeing about their emasculated condition — what I call the White Man Can Grump school of theatre — is as tedious as it’s predictable.
Coetzee’s subtle eye and ear partially sustain one, but in both cases we’ve heard most of these self-piteous viewpoints before. Problems with uppity women and uppity blacks seem to figure largely in both cases — and indeed Voss’s last sketch, about an oafish sex tourist on the loose in Thailand, was positively offensive.
Wit, irony and self-deprecation are little in evidence. Clearly we are invited to sympathise with these generally quite unpleasant machismo people and their failure to get with the post-racial and post-feminist programme. And how many more times do we have to hear that a boy’s discovery that his willy wasn’t the biggest in the class was a soul-shattering event?
Voss should be given someone’s material, so that he’s properly stretched as an actor; and Coetzee, an undoubtedly rich writing talent, might profitably seek out new topics. I came away from both plays having been forcibly reminded, again, that most white male South Africans need to grow up fast, and so seldom do — which is not, I fear, the point that Voss and Coetzee were trying to make. May we move on now? — Guy Willoughby
Gig of the week
Warrick Sony: Culemborg Centre, Old Marine Drive, Foreshore, Cape Town (follow the signs off Oswald Pirow) – Saturday November 10
African Dope Records and MAL Productions present A Dope Nite Out. Celebrate the much-anticipated launch of seminal South African experimental-beat pioneers The Kalahari Surfers’ new album Akasic Record, their first in almost 13 years. Also appearing are hip-kwaai-ragga-hop outfit Ghetto Muffin, 5MPH, Krushed & Sorted, DJ Pierre Armageddon and MC Sky 189. African Dope discs and gear will be available at the launch. Look out for African Dope Volume 1, a choice selection of new African Dope tunes released on Sony Music Epic imprint featuring new material from Felix Laband, Kalahari Surfers, Moodphase 5ive remixes and more. The event starts at 10pm. Admission is R50.