Alex Dodd

If ever I need a reminder of why I live in such in such a wayward bruiser of a city, I find it by stepping out of my (un)comfort zone and taking a dip into Joburg’s ever surprising and unexpected art circuit. It rarely fails to redeem. Take last night…

At about 5.30pm I’m sitting at Boekehuis, Jozi’s stalwart indie bookshop, sipping on a cappuccino, listening to a bit of Bach and paging through Angaza Africa: African Art Now, British Museum curator Chris Spring’s new hardcover glossy hymn to African contemporary art. As the last rays of the Highveld sun start to retreat from the Sunbeam-polished red stoep, I
remember that Rites of Fealty/ Rites of Passage, an evening of performance art, is about to unfold at The Bag Factory artists’ studios. So Tuesday night begins with a trip downtown to gritty Fordsburg, past the factory warehouses and the mosque to the energetic end of Mahlatini Street, where four televisions have been installed in a tree above a DJ consol blasting ‘decon’ remixes to make John Cage proud.
Artist Rat Western emerges from the interior in a black jacket, white suspenders and lots of kohl eye makeup, and stands on the pavement singing a mournfully defiant ditty. Over and over she repeats her plaintive mantra: ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’. The next thing she’s yanking on a big industrial chain that hauls up the creaking corrugated iron front door onto an antechamber covered in clots of black coal. In the centre of the gallery, Johan Thom, who is about to depart for three years of study at Goldsmiths in London, is half naked before an iron tub filled with milk.
His wife Mika, who has just left her position at Gallery Momo to accompany him to London, is dressed in a nurse’s uniform and proceeds to lovingly slather handfuls of blood and honey over his shaved skull and shoulders, after which he submerges his head in the tub of milk for as long as he can stand it.
It’s extreme affecting stuff – visceral, corporeal – flesh, blood and bare song taking our breath away on a cold weekday night, reminding us what we’re made of. Photographer Nadine Hutton has transformed her studio into a confined, tented space. The viewer must crouch down and enter through razor wire portals into the smoke-filled interior surrounded by a crucible of projected flames blazing around a small altar on which lies a South African ID book. It’s the closest I’ve come to experiencing what it must have felt like to be a victim of one of the violent attacks on foreigners. Better than reading so many life-sapping newspaper reports – and Hutton should know. She worked at the Mail & Guardian as chief photographer for many years before embarking on her career as an artist.
The evening is a wild array of different acts and moments, unfolding sporadically amidst the noisy hubbub of the increasingly populated studio complex. Fresh talents like Anthea Moys, Ismael Farouk and Dinkies Sithole all play their part in the evening’s pop up carnival of happenings. But mostly people are hooked on the solid conceptual bait underpinning Bronwyn Lace’s mystifying game of ping pong. A myriad of transparent gut strings, attached on one end
via Velcro to Lace’s moving body and on the other to an assembly of ping pong balls hanging down a gallery wall, track her movements as she plays this solitary game, scoring only against herself. The movement of the suspended ping pong balls,
reminiscent of the strings inside a grand piano, is determined by Lace’s
gestures but is also oddly poetic in and
of itself.
Thursday night was whole different story – a surprisingly warm excursion into the avant-garde digital realm via the work of three artists brought together by gallerist Ricardo Fornoni for a show entitled Trespass – ‘to encroach or creep, gradually, so that a footing is imperceptibly established.’ The exhibition had precisely that effect on my own consciousness. At first I was mainly struck by the foreignness and coolness of the works on show, but rarely quick to bolt, I soon found myself engaged in conversation with Fornoni, who like Warren Siebrits and Michael Stevenson, not only revels in combining talents in unexpected ways but also in making sense of his choices by writing about them. As a native Spanish speaker with Chilean roots, his texts are wonderfully red-blooded and provocatively lateral. With his pioneering trans-national spirit and his global network, Fornoni has definitely brought something new and valuable to the Jan Smuts art strip. Not only does he bring together artists from different generic pools, he is also intent on forging live connectivities across national and cultural boundaries.

On Trespass, I was most drawn to Nils Eichman’s freshly abstract engagements with colour. Eichman, who recently moved here from Berlin, is entranced by the peculiar qualities of African light, which he has translated into his intriguing high-gloss compositions in the quirkiest of ways. And I’m not the only one who thinks so. Based on his works for the Trespass show he has been invited to join the Florence Biennale for 2009. Never a dull moment.