They say if you have pictures of dogs/cats/hedgehogs on your blog it helps with traffic. So I thought I'd show you all my dog Sickert. He likes red balls. I make him attack people by tying bacon to their knees.

They also say if you equate art and sport it makes the one as popular as the other. But we all know this isn't possible. Sport will never be as popular as art. Ever.

There was only one decent work on the recent show at the AVA (Ball Sports), and it's no secret it was my one.

But perusing through some of the other works that somehow made it onto the show, there were some gems. It reminds me that Kirsty Cockerill is doing a great job on that gallery, bringing in a lot of vital (as in the vitamin pills, not as in indispensable) art. Yay, well done. Now hire a painter cause the walls were filthy and I find that distracting. The show was, barring this flaw, nicely curated, with distinct themes coming through in all the different rooms. The first room was all about the body and, as it seems hard to separate it, sexuality. So we had Lawrence Lemoana's unsurprising but pleasant print, Zanele Muholi's itimate moment from the Gay World Cup soccer. There was a nice ball point drawing in there too, but I'm screwed if I can remember who it was. The second room focussed much more on the ball, but also it seemed the politics that are attached to it, so we had some uninspiring Fritha Langerman sculptures of balls with spikes, studs, glass, etc, a nicely oblique floor piece by Elgin Rust of the plans of a cathedral chalked on the floor, maybe slightly overstated by a large steel football in the middle. Stuart Bird presented framed Ten Rand notes stamped with a 2 and 0 to make each one say 2010. Cutely cynical. I was bit annoyed that the price of the work was R2010 and the edition 2010, pushing that cute to twee. I just hope he don't have to cut them all up. Ralph Borland's Jubilee, the exceedingly annoying vuvuzela piece, which I would really like if it didn't grate on my nerves. Playing along a thin line of celebration of death and life, destruction and creation and some other happy binaries, it's best seen from a distance. There was also a piece by Svea Josephy which was pleasant, but I'll reserve my comment because her solo is tomorrow at Bell-Roberts.

Upstairs was all the bits and pieces that didn't tie in. Ed Young finally got to show his verboten kiddy porn piece, The European Collector who Could Gaze Uninterruptedly, which is a very zoomed up video of some kiddies playing naked in a garden. With a ball, in case you didn't get the connection. Apparently he was sneaky in the way he got it onto the show... Also upstairs was Charles Maggs Fight, a rythmic and humourous video of two people fucking each other up. Lovely gratuitous violence.

The show was good, and lots of it interesting. And I'm glad too to see a curated group show, how I miss them. It reminded me why people rather watch soccer.

Labels: ava, ball sports, Charles Maggs, Ed Young, Elgin Rust, Lawrence Lemoana, Ralph Borland, stuart bird, svea josephy, Zanele Muholi