Here are some random from our archives, from our Birthday month in 2006, 2007 and 2008. It's self-indulgent, but what can I say:

2006: Horns

Got sent this image of Khwezi by a source calling itself Panopticon. Isn't that a sweet photo?

2007: Easy on The Eye

My feelings about paper are something I don't hide. Printmaking classes at art school left scars, that are continually abraded by the horror of the pretty box identity work that is the mainstay of young lost undergraduates and horrible artists. The idea of cutouts makes me cold sweat, and the words moleskine, fabriano, 2B and putty rubber make it freeze onto my body. Awful, mean, tactile material. Shudder.

So I walked into the AVA with some apprehension this afternoon. I missed the opening owing to a mixture of being mildly ill and discovering all six seasons of Sex and the City on DVD (it happens to the best of us). I must admit though instead of horror Liza Grobler's Nine Chicks and a Dick series left me pleasantly amused. The lines had whimsy, and the surreal (can one still use that word?) approach to drawing wasn't overblown, didn't leave a bad taste, and was funny. Only problem was there were 9 pictures of chicks, one portrait of a dick all making good conceptual senses, and then a strange and ugly drawing of an eye, and some balls of barb wire sculptures. One must ask why. Still better than the shite that normally adorns paper.

The next room was also nice. This show called Paper and Me was a group show about some artists relation to paper. Some was gross, and I can't even remember it, just a blur of little torn out things and some decorative crap that'd look good above my TV when I advance to all four seasons of Grey's Anatomy. But some of it was ok. Lynette Bester had a series called Bitter Sweet that was paper pulp moulded into the shape of tree bark, funny in the same way that that Sushi restaurant with the fish tank tables was funny. Just slightly less macabre. Marna Hatting made some nice mysterious drawings. There was someone else who made some cut and paste things, called Waiting for Information which was interesting in a cut and paste cutesy way. can't remember the artist because (see paragraph one) I wasn't carrying a notebook.

Kirsty Gallery Director asked me to promote the New Media room, which has had a dearth of submissions since it opened. She says with all the moaning about video art recently somebody should be getting off their arses.

Oh, and there were some paintings upstairs.

2008: The Shitty Week Part 3

You'd have thought I'd have recovered from my shitty week by now. Be that as it may, I still feel an urge to complete the thoughts that started off this little series, and look into Christian Nerf and Douglas Gimberg's One More Day to Regret.
The show sandwiched a week in which I had a particularly faithless feeling. And now, worse, I haven't been able to get this show out of my head all of the next week. Indeed, with all the emphasis in the press releases and elsewhere on futility and meaningless (quotes such as "The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express" and "The artists themselves do not motion to put the socially conscious viewer at ease, and it is perhaps the task of this projected viewer to grapple with their own questions of meaning, to interrogate the idea of the hierarchy between the blatantly meaningful (the things we are taught to care about) and the meaningless (the work of the devil)." and "a backwards logic that illustrates how one has to lie in order to avoid becoming a complete fraud, how one has to fail in order to avoid becoming disgustingly triumphant and how one can only avoid the pretence of the meaningful by attempting to express meaningless."), I felt I had a pop song stuck in my head: a half fragment devoid of significance battering around between my ears. Instead of One More Day to Regret it was Oops... I Did It Again. The more I thought about it the metaphor got stuck in my head, Britney's insatiable demand for meaningless, as embodied by the catchy but content free choruses, seemed appropriate for what was happening in my head: "Did they go on the trip, or didn't they?" backwards and forwards. Britney is also a master of constructed identity. The constructed elements are what sold the music by creating a hype, an identity for the music that fills in it's lack of content with pervasive virginal sexuality, an All-American cheerleader beauty and cleanliness (with enough dirty to make it seem cleaner). The content is now an image. In the words of the song Oops... I Did It Again:

I think I did it again
I made you believe
We're more than just friends
Oh baby


And later:

Oops I did it again
I played with your heart
Got lost in the game

And finally:

I'm not that innocent

Britney, here, addressing her audience not some jilted lover, admits to pulling the wool over our eyes. NME, in their review of the album of the same name, called Britney "an evil genius". Doug and Christian have too created hype through the construction of identity, with a similiar tugging of the wool, and a similar built in confession, although admittedly the currency they are after is slightly different than Britney's. There's a second major deviation, in that Doug and Christian aren't using a virginal girliness but a machismo. The image that they present in lieu of content is that of the disenfranchised white male, the opposite of the metrosexual city boy who has found enfranchisement in hair and skin. It is the tinkerer, the DIY garage man, who in this post-industrial post-apartheid era finds little use for his skills, so embarks on futile projects to satisfy his masculine urges towards usefulness: be it a garden bench or a boat. This image is reinforced by the acts they repeatedly advertised in the run-up to the show: growing a beard (a symbol of matured masculinity), drinking beer, braai-ing, and acts of destruction. And of course, rowing a boat containing three generations of white men. And I hope the symbolism of them having to bail out a neat vagina shaped vessel isn't lost. As for Douglas allegedly dropping an ounce of gold off the side, midway through the trip, Britney once again comes to my rescue:

"Britney before you go, there's something I want you to have."
"Oh its beautiful, but wait a minute, isn't this... ?"
"Yes, it is."
"But I thought the old lady dropped it into the ocean in the end."
"Well baby, I went down and got it for you."
"Oh, you shouldn't have."

Of course, you could accuse me of reading too much into Britney. When faced with meaninglessness the intelligent brain obliges and fills in the blanks. Similarly, when faced with self-proclaimed futility, well, I'm not that innocent. When I stopped looking at Britney as intended, other possibilities sprang up.
When I stopped looking at One More Day to Regret as an extended social experiment in hype, and looked at it as a traditional object of art, the work is loaded with meaning. Indeed, the work, especially Escape to Robben Island, could be political, although in dubious taste. Three gentlemen attempt to escape the turmoil of home to willing incarceration, or perhaps a reversal of Autshumao's (Harry the Strandloper) legendary escape in 1658 (and the only succesful rowboat escape in the island morbid history).
Or a reference to the drowning in 1819 of Nxele, the Xhosa chief who died trying to escape. His name, as Nelson Mandela points out in his introduction to Robben Island in his autobiography, has been embedded into Xhosa in the phrase: Ukuza kuka Nxele, meaning a forlorn hope. Is this the futility?
Of course, a friendlier reading could be a comparison to Escape From Alcatraz, the famous movie based on the true story of Frank Morris and John and Clarence Anglin 's escape from that prison. It is perhaps more appropriate: the escape used an elaborate ruse, and the outcome is covered in myth. It is wandered if Frank Morris was waving not drowning, essentially purposefully creating a legend. The starring role of Clint Eastwood, famous as the cowboy with a tough, no-nonsense masculinity, and the loose cannon cop, is also fitting, he finds himself through the toughness of his actions.

And finally, Britney once again:

It might seem like a crush
But it doesn't mean that I'm serious