Shit, is this show even still up? A bit slow on the posting here, but rather late than never, right? Around two weeks or so ago I attended the opening of Power Play at the Goodman Cape.

In ice-hockey, a power-play is a period when one or more of the opposing teams players is in the sin bin, and you have a player advantage. Well, it felt like this show was a man or two down. The show was dominated by the Essop twins, newcomers, who I'm afraid, have overstretched their one idea. I wander if their meteoric rise has pushed them a little too hard, without letting them have time to develop. Or even edit for that matter. Two works would have been as successful as the ten on the show. For example, the bizarre fun and politics of their pit-bulling training machine was lost in the clutter. Perhaps it could have worked better as a sculpture. I worry these guys aren't exploring enough. Formula + Money = Glass Ceiling.

I was so distracted by the pricing on the Moshekwa Langa's that I barely looked at them. The impression that lasts is that they were good and not very challenging or playful.

I missed the performance by Anthea Moys. But the documentation of her previous performances was confusing and incomplete and vaguely embarassing. I didn't feel like sitting around and waiting for one of the two lukewarm headphones attached to her videos. Maybe the answers were in there. Same problem with the video by Jean and Zinaid Meeran. What's wrong with sound?

Dan Halter's work was the highlight, a mielie pip engraved with the words: "When the Belly is Full The Brain Starts to Think." Lying on the floor, it was pathetic, unassuming and moving.

In cricket, a powerplay is when their are limits put on the fielding side with only two fielders allowed outside the 30 yard circle. This show kinda felt like that. Restrained, a little action outside the circle, but no one really in the outfield.

I also attended, the prints and editions show at Whatiftheworld, which I really enjoyed. Only two points to give:
1. Avant Car Guard, I like your work but: Formula + Money = Endless fucking Repetition
2. My work was the best on the show.

Labels: anthea moys, avant car guard, dan halter, Essop Twins, Goodman Gallery, jean and zinaid meeran, Moshekwa Langa, What if the world

In Camera Kathryn Smith
Opening Saturday 12 January at 18h00
Exhibition closes Saturday 2 February 2008
Artist, author, editor, curator, collaborator extraordinaire and currently senior lecturer in the Department of Art at Stellenbosch University, Kathryn Smith has established a reputation as an artist with a fascination for forensic investigation and an interest in crimes of passion and the rhetoric of evil.

In June 2007 Smith was amongst 6 international artists and a critic invited to participate in the residency program, exhibition and presentation at the iCommons Summit in Dubrovnik, Croatia, for which they produced and workshoped both physical and virtual work engaging with fair use, copyright, re-mixing, piracy and/or collaboration.

In camera (‘in private’ or ‘in secret’) refers to legal testimony heard in private chambers instead of in open court, usually when reliving the experience of a violent and traumatic event through verbal narration would be aggravated by having to do this in public.

For her first solo exhibition in Cape Town since ‘Euphemism’, the Standard Bank Young Artist Award exhibition at Iziko South African National Gallery in 2005, Smith sets up a controlled, immersive environment of light, sound, drawing and photography. Material for the drawings was sourced from a range of print and online media and processed so as to blur the distinction between the handmade and the mass-produced. The portrait subjects are the victims and perpetrators of violent acts, the circumstances of which remain almost incomprehensible in their extremity, even if the facts informing tabloid revelations of these cruel private desires are known. There is a particular focus on violence done to, and by, children.

Smith states: "I am particularly interested in how, through repetitive media circulation, certain photographic images get detached from their subjects and the representation of a person becomes emblematic of ‘victimhood’, ‘the missing’, ‘monstrosity’ or ‘evil’. This kind of rhetoric functions as a means to situate perpetrators of violence outside the realm of human behaviour and does not allow us to dwell on the particular human and social circumstances of each violent interaction."

The drawings are done with brush, paper, acrylic and ultraviolet-sensitive inks invisible to the naked eye. The lighting design, set to a computerized timing schedule creating apparently random intermittent phases of blacklight exposure, complete darkness and ambient light, inverts the camera’s function of an open shutter where a light-sensitive surface is exposed, and a dark state where nothing is captured nor visible.

In setting up a relationship between the spectrum and the spectral, disruption, revelation and obfuscation, In Camera is a project about ghosts and mental afterimages, an attempt to reclaim that which eludes cognitive and emotional capture and retention.

Labels: Goodman Gallery, Kathryn Smith, listings

It's not often you actually feel a deep dark thrill of anticipation for a show, but this is how I felt about Moshekwa Langa's opening at the Goodman this afternoon. I surprised myself by realising I'm actually quite interested in this art thing.

If people can be measured by the risks they are prepared to take with painting, then Langa is about 16m tall, and as brave as a Kamikazi pilot. He has managed to hijack the current trend of painting's anti-heroic regression into abject pre-pubescent scribbling (exemplified by many, but you could say Tracey Emin does girls and David Shrigley does boys) and make it black. Very black, and very hardcore. It's a stroke of genius. One imagines that self-obsessed Britons who assume they are the only ones who ever get the joke must shit themselves when they see this stuff. It tells one very clearly that if you want to start competing to see who can be the most abject, you better understand black people who lived under apartheid are off the top of the chart, and they'll eat you for breakfast (being cannibals from Africa and all).

A lot of the works were unframed, just treated paper pinned to the wall, in a way that managed to make it look like the Goodman couldn't afford to hang them, which was brilliant. The paper used was often a kind of flecked card that reminded me of the cheap cheap paper which would probably be the only stuff available for really poor kids to draw on. The paper was sometimes glazed with milky resiny stuff the composition of which I was too lazy to establish, being a bit abject myself.

The pictures were done with bic pens and koki pens and very plain plaka-style paint, some smudged and run from being glazed. There were figures and mindmaps and collages, and some dodgy palm trees which I heard some ageing art lovers getting very cross about.

Oh oh wouldn't it be nice to be brave and mad like Moshekwa Langa. Impossible to achieve if you are limited to a South African audience I'm afraid. It wiil take them about fifty years to work out what you're on about. Probably the only reason why the viewers even pretended to like this stuff was because they're shit scared of Linda Givon.

Labels: Goodman Gallery, Moshekwa Langa, paintings

Well, it's been a weekend of jeans. Firstly, the Studio 2666 Sundown Lecture by Prof. Jean Mathee on Friday, which was an amazing evening, and the first time I felt moved by theory. Read Lizza's review below, and keep an eye out for the video, which we'll probably put up when we finish it. Then on Saturday morning I dropped by the Goodman Gallery for Lisa Brice's Base One Two Three, which was made up of paintings on stretched denim. Sounds gross, but she had in fact painted with bleach onto the material which, besides from being technically hard, created beautiful tones with soft edges. Combined with the fact that the images were literally part of the canvas surface and contrasty, it sucked at your eye. Like an inverted Turin Shroud. With better definition. And more sex.
Lots more sex, as you could imagine from the title which references the teeny slang for the landmarks of a sexual encounter. (First Base Kissing, Second Base Light Petting, Third Base Heavy Petting, Fourth Base, significantly missing from the title, Home Run). Unlike the press release on the Goodman Gallery website which states: "...Brice questions how one dare speak of love in these times, in a world that is plunged into war and structural violence on so many fronts. But if it is the antidote and armour against dark times, the conclusion of course is: how can one not?", the images are not romantic or political, or for that matter even love. Rather they speak of the anticipation of sex and actually come across as rather violent. Like sex, the most erotic part is the anticipation, and this makes the images very sexy, not visually but conceptually. They wouldn't make decent porn at all.

I liked the denim. Using a material that is the legendary material of youthful rebellion and sexuality, before Woolworths started to make them, brings in a whole layer of adolescence to the work. It's not only the anticipation of sex but also of the first time. The images look like they are caused by friction on the material, like your old pair of jeans which have an imprint of your ass on the back.

Having said all this though, the work is safe, like a broeknaai... no one is going to get pregnant, no one is taking it too seriously, no one is going to get hurt, and in the end you don't get the satisfaction of a good fuck.

Labels: Goodman Gallery, lisa brice

I hope you all had a great National Braai Day, celebrating the only heritage that remains important: the vast consumption of meat. I must admit I had a great long weekend, rugby and brandycokespecials on Saturday, a wild birthday party at L/B's on Sunday, followed by a wedding with loads of fine and rare whisk(e)y on Monday. With all this consumption on the go, it comes as no surprise to me that I have not found the energy to review Jeremy Wafer's show at Goodman (Oh sir! It's only a tiny little thin one)(No. Fuck off - I'm full...)(Oh sir, it is only wafer thin)( Look - I couldn't eat another thing. I'm absolutely stuffed. Bugger off.)(Oh sir, just... just one...)(Oh all right. Just one.)

What struck me about this show, titled very minimally 'New Work', was it's modernity. I forgot that there are still artists working within modernist movements of art, this show being a largely minimalist formalist affair. Very strange, and my first reaction would be to be bored and go have a smoke. Which I did. But having gotten a ride to Goodman, I had to hang around while my lift schmoozed. On closer examination the work still refuses to reveal any content, it is still a meditation on form, shape, material and space. I enjoyed the time in the gallery, just wandering around, looking at the shapes. Recovering from a three-day consumption binge, it seems like an important thing to have this art that doesn't release it's energy with ease, a return to indigestible matter, steel, wax, card, bitumen, clay. With that said however, I am surprised that art in this manner can still exist, more purposeless than most art because the intellectual, cultural and theoretical modes it refers to have become stale.

Labels: Goodman Gallery, jeremy wafer

“Cape Town art desperately needs to realise that competition is healthy and needs to be enlarged. It must be difficult to make a living as an artist in Cape Town, which perhaps explains the back-biting that takes place.”
So says Linda Givon, in an article in the Sunday Times. (First I quote Barry Ronge and now Linda Givon?? Something strange is happening on this blog.)
I would like to, on this note, point out an old cartoon by Lizza.

Labels: Goodman Gallery, Linda Givon