Photography is a boring medium. Advertising ruined it for all of us. And then along came assholes with digital cameras, whose lives are less interesting than Wolgang Tillmans, who thought we would like looking at pictures of their friends, their ceiling fans, the corner of their beds. No sense of design, of colour, of composition, of tone (and these terms can be applied conceptually as well as formally). In the words of my friend in Paris: Random Contemporary. It gets worse when the photographer has a social bent: Concerned Random Contemporary. Ew.

Svea Josephy's Twin Towns made me happy. It made me forget all the horror I'd seen. For starters, the images were exceptionally well planned and executed. Secondly, I got a free copy of the catalogue, so I'm obliged to write nice. And it managed to be interesting and political at the same town. Wow.

The basic premise of the show, as the title suggests, was to photograph towns in different places that are connected by their name. It sounds really simple, but the more you examine the prints, the more complicated it gets, to the point where the matchy matchy names are just a device to examine different social and economic realities. It throws up questions like why is Africa poor and Europe rich, what events allowed South Africa to be colonised. My favourite pair of images are the ones above, showing Hanover in Germany and Hanover Park in Cape Town, where two messy histories are shown: Hitler's Germany and the Afrikaner's South Africa.

What really draws one into the images however, is the amazing compositions and the perfect matching of compositions in the matching pairs. Lines and focal points are almost perfectly matched or mirrored in the images. And I'm sure it was no easy feat. This type of hook is so appealing in work, and it brought me back and back to reexamine each image, not even the Bell-Robert's fine wine could distract me.

Labels: Bell-Roberts, svea josephy

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

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