It’s a good thing Kathryn Smith’s oeuvre is death for her art is utterly lifeless. It’s also a good thing her show is called Euphemism, for then one may politely replace adjectives such as ”trite” and ”self-indulgent” with their euphemistic counterparts ”interesting” and ”postmodern”.
Because the unequivocal conclusion arrived at by this reviewer while spending an afternoon attempting to discern some sort of point to this sprawling, frustrating, incoherent exhibition by the 2004 Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year was ”What drugs were the selectors on?” To such a degree is Euphemism merely a confused sum of its parts that even the most earnest efforts to sublimate some kind of meta-text on to it proved fruitless.
Here we have the artist sharing with us her fascination with Marilyn Monroe; here we have the artist in a grocery store with a group of Rat Pack impersonators; here we have the artist made up as a glamorous corpse with fake insects aesthetically positioned upon her; here we have the artist dressed as some kind of fairy posing with donkeys made up to look like unicorns; here we have the artist having the aphorism ”Never look for unicorns until you’ve run out of ponies” tattooed on herself; here we have the artist as a tourist in England on the trail of Jack the Ripper.
And what does all this amount to? The unfortunate viewer can’t even get away with forming any kind of subjective solution to the riddles presented since every aspect of Euphemism is accompanied by a prolix explanation of what it means. Not only does this didacticism mean that whatever mystery potentially inherent in the art is neutered, but the art isn’t even allowed to speak for itself.
Furthermore, Smith doesn’t exactly do herself any favours with the accompanying texts that read like the efforts of a first-year culture and media studies student. Astounding revelations such as ”movies are interesting as they represent what is the absolute opposite of truth” and ”watching films is no longer an exclusively public experience in cinemas” abound in this expanse of pseudo-sociological flotsam.
In Peculiar Modern Behaviour, the section of Euphemism dealing with Monroe, Smith asserts that it is ”less about Marilyn Monroe and more about musing on the symptoms and conditions of a zeitgeist that more often not [sic] seems rather pathological”. To my mind it is less than telling us something new about the doomed Hollywood star or the cultural forces that shaped her mythicism and more about betraying a breathless, bourgeois and all-too-common obsession with celebrity.
One has to ask the question: Is this really the best young artist South Africa can show for itself at this present moment in time?
Then that eternal tabloid twin of celebrity, death, also gets the romanticised treatment.
Says Smith of her love affair with the legend of Jack the Ripper: ”Culture [represents] artists and criminals as equally socially ‘marginal”’ and supports this assertion with myriad quotes by famous intellectuals opining sagaciously on the art/death parallel.
Yet, however analogous an artist planning a work may be to a criminal preparing a crime, the former vicariously basks in the transgression, peril and danger involved whereas the latter actually lays it on the line.
While the criminal risks capture, incarceration and death, the latter risks nothing more threatening than a desultory review.
Euphimism runs at the Johannes Stegmann Gallery in Bloemfontein from February 2 until March 3. Then it transfers to the South African National Gallery in Cape Town on April 13