What a load of pre-Crapalite!

This promises to be the oddest exhibition of 2007: the inaugural showing of work by the recently formed pre-Crapalite Brotherhood. What may on the surface look like a whole lot of bum fluff, actually has its roots in other, rather sophisticated visual art collaborations that have come to be accepted as stable commentary on the times artists have lived through.

Think of the whole of Dada. Think of Gilbert and George — that prim and proper British duo of performance artists who turned their genteel wit to the streets, constructing mammoth graphics of wild youths adorned by horrid images of piss and shit.

Gilbert and George have become a British art institution and their enormous, recent retrospective at the Tate Modern shows just how seriously the art world takes its fancy-dress acts.

Today we are standing in the print workshop of renowned Jo’burg art dealer and art-book publisher David Krut. Here the pre-Crapalite brotherhood have swiftly established themselves as a grand diversion from the serious, professional printmaking going on. The shy and introspective printmakers — all young and oh so pretty — are squirming at the antics of the rather matronly (however male) pre-Crapalites.

The most famous of the duo is Robert Whitehead — now, that’s Isidingo‘s Barker Haines to your average South African housewife. He has teamed up with long-time friend, the international set designer Johan Engels to create an exhibition that is uneven to say the least. Meaning that some of the work has spectacular finish — like the series Die Scent of Man: small individually packaged liquor vials, each in a unique rather camp, French perfume bottle design. Other graphics are rough and some naively homoerotic.

‘Last year, while staying at a sublime establishment on the banks of the Marico River, shortly before the Herman Charles Bosman Festival –which we happily missed by a week — we had a revelation. Just like what happened on the banks of the Jordan,” says Whitehead, ‘and the pre-Crapalite movement was born.”

Somewhere along the way — during this mad interview, while eating fabulously expensive, imported grappa- filled dark chocolate cigars, Whitehead promises to mail me the official pre–Crapalite manifesto. It never arrived.

But when I asked him what the new movement actually stands for he answered enigmatically: ‘Somewhat what queer has come to mean to our generation. People are going to realise that they are and always have been pre-Crapalites. Even if they haven’t identified themselves as such, yet.”

If it takes on, the pre-Crapalite movement could become what Walter Battis’s Fook Island was to art lovers in the Seventies and Eighties. But now Engels and Whitehead have cemented their friendship with this collaboration. ‘We are in such close harmony with our work that we actually could not show separately,” Engels remarks. ‘One series of works we will be showing we’ve called teleo-pathetic art. We did them separately and the printers have printed them together, each without the other seeing what had been made.”

Given the haphazard nature of the works they couldn’t really fail — one has rows of little penises screened over a wild scribble.

The centerpiece of the show will be a series of blank books with the most extraordinary covers. The two have conceived 12 novels dealing with different aspects of South African life and have illustrated them appropriately.

‘When you go to a bookshop,” Engels says, ‘you find that the covers are the thing that gets you, then you read the synopsis and, really, what’s inside is irrelevant.”

The plots — described in the blurbs go like this: ‘Imelda, who used to be called ‘the fat girl’ in the apartheid era in Witrivier, decides to take her life in her hands. She starts going to the local gym where she meets Sandile, her young black instructor. The scandalous affair rocks the whole village.”

And, ‘A young housewife growing up during the early days of apartheid, in Benoni, is forced back to work at the local butchery by her uncaring husband. One day as she cuts into a fresh liver her mind finally snaps, and it is the gentle hands of Terence her handsome butcher who is able to lift her up from out of the blood and sawdust.”

The more serious aspect of the exhibition is a series of prints by Engels as working sketches for the unrealised TRC Cantata composed by Philip Miller and conceptualised by Janice Honeyman.

The pre-Crapalites: Farce, Fiction or Fine Art? shows at the David Krut gallery 142 Jan Smuts Avenue until July 21