SMAC, apparently according to the mother of one it's employees, is street slang for heroin. Luckily, the gallery is easier to kick. I've been completely cold turkey since Ed Young, Ruth Sacks, Christian Nerf and Douglas Gimberg had their show there in March. Still, they are trying to be street smart in their dealing, this time by sending a bus to pick up impressionable minds not willing/able to drive all the way to Stellenbosch. I think it's a great initiative, especially for a gallery out in the sticks, and I was surprised that more people didn't take up the ride. The bus was a little empty, populated mostly by some old cronies from Michaelis, which led to a dramatic, wild and silly bus ride, which did my traditional Saturday morning hangover no good at all. At all.
Arriving at SMAC one is confronted by the contemporary collection, a mix of young and more established artists. There were some slightly boring paintings by Willie Bester. Stuart Bird (of Zuma Biscuits fame) put up a piece in which two heart shaped wooden plaques, one blue, one pink, were mounted on the wall. The blue one had a large fish hook attached to it, the pink had vagina shaped scratches and gouges in it. I'm not easily disturbed, but the piece has been hanging round in my mind since. Somehow, even in our saturated society, the confluence of sex and violence is still shocking. Svea Josephy exhibited a pair of photos from a series which left me dying to see more. It's a very simple premise, taking photos of cities with the same name, in this case Barcelona, Spain, and Barcelona, South Africa, but it really works, helped on by the beauty of the prints, the depth of detail and saturated colours. I really hope to see the whole series soon. I had a similar obsession about the twin cities Johannesburg, one in California and one in Gauteng, and I think in the comparisons you get to see the flipside of the dreams, colonial, capitalist, that make one city great and the other a failure.
The most horrifying piece on the show was a work by Ed Young. It was a print, quite nice, of white text on a black background. The wall behind it was also painted black. The text says, in Italian: You'd have to be fucking desperate to be on this crappy show. Not too horrifying? You're right. A normal Ed Young work, till I saw the 'fucking' in the title had been crossed out with permanent marker. I couldn't believe Ed would allow himself to be censored, it seems fundamentally against what I always felt his work was about: breaking down the values and bullshit of gallery-based culture. I checked the catalogue too, to find the same thing had happened there. I would like to at this point out the article recently appearing in Artthrob.co.za, written by Kendell Geers, in which he fumes about censorship. I know this is only one swear word, but it's a slippery slope.

I've always had a strained relationship with painting, we don't understand each other too good. But having a painter as a girlfriend, I've paid more attention, and we get along a bit better now. With this new mutual reconciliation I was quite looking forward to seeing Trasi Henen's show, the main feature at SMAC, called 'The Delicate Life Pursuer'. This is the first time she is showing in Cape Town after moving from Jo'burg. So although she has had quite a few solo's I'm pretty unfamiliar with her work besides seeing some shitty jpegs that didn't impress me too much. Judging, perhaps unfairly, from those jpegs this body of work is a bolder, and more impressive offering from her previous work, even though some pieces looked a little hasty. The paintings were big, using a lot of language borrowed it seemed from architecture. Cut away buildings, roof struts and walls were all layered, clustered and worked over, jumbling around the canvas. Using dark backgrounds, and shadowy layers, the pieces seemed to speak of an impending apocalyptic doom, where parallel lines no longer meet and the rules that keep us secure are upended. The most successful work was in the back room, where the painting mounted on the wall spread off the canvas into a huge mural behind, literally the forms exploded off the painting. This sort of thing can easily descend into kitsch, but it was pulled off with enough energy that it ever quite sank. The biggest problem was the title, which gave no clues. Apparently it came off the back of Trasi's microwave. Appropriate perhaps in origin: a world were words have lost their meaning. But it seemed too light to match the content of the work.

I can't say I'm hooked on SMAC yet, but as a young gallery they seem to have the right idea, supporting the artists they feature financially, something that is much needed.
The bus ride home, however, was worse than the one out, I'm still bearing the bruises.

Labels: Ed Young, smac, stuart bird, svea josephy, trasi henen