It’s easy enough to describe Avant Car Guard’s work as nothing more than a self-referential and of love-biting the hand that feeds — a series of in-jokes and one-liners that uncritically use the same methods and media that they seek to criticise.
But this would miss the point. On closer inspection it becomes very clear that their work is not trying to cripple and implode the South African art industry; they’re not seriously expecting their photograph of themselves diving into a little oil-slick pond — representing the incestuous backwaters of the South African art market (Avant Car Guard ‘dive into” the South African contemporary art market, 2007) — to shake the art kings and queens off their screen-printed Steven Cohen thrones.
They’re not that serious and they’re not heroes. The point is that there is no point, because art is ultimately a pointless practice. The costume party that is the Car Guard’s back-handed terrain scrapes away a tiny section of the super-serious overcoat that glosses many a contemporary artist’s and curator’s CV, only to expose that there is nothing underneath it except more gloss, pomp and glory. And that this pomp and glory is one of the best things about art — hence the work Untitled (2007) featuring the band as gods of death metal with a naked groupie. Their persistent nibbling at the sugar coating that supports South Africa’s tender position in the international art market and the air of pretence and pseudo-sincerity of identity politics boffins and middle-aged, post-colonialist troopers is the key to why the Car Guard’s practice works. Where else are we going to refer? There is no outside.
Avant Car Guard’s epiphanies, after all, mark the mantra that all artists should be repeating to themselves every evening before they lay down their sleepy heads. Art is not important, but so what? (Of course Art is important to artists.)
Some of Avant Car Guard’s photographs, the one-liners such as Dancing on Pierneef’s Grave, might seem like they’ve been snapped in a couple of minutes amid giggles and good times, a fleeting moment. After watching them doing a shoot I realised that it’s not all fun and games; they take it all pretty seriously and so they should.
What Avant Car Guard shows is that art shouldn’t always have to be about something overtly emotional or intellectually profound. More often than not, the shallower it gets, the better. Doing pointless things, knowing they’re pointless, while still taking them seriously is the ultimate privilege of the artist. Consequently, smoke machines, primary colours, Jacobean ruffs, cardboard box guitars and, most importantly, vibes, can all become part of a day’s work.
This is an edited version of an article that appeared in the first edition of The Pavement Special. Avant Car Guard is Zander Blom, Jan-Henri Booyens and Michael MacGarry.