The Art Cowboy

By Peter Machen


Staying close to the light.


I have often said that the best art moves me like cinema and the best cinema moves me like art. Of course, like most aphorisms, this is not true all the time, but it does accurately describe my own predilections in both directions on these supposedly twin landscapes. And video art, which should conjoin these mighty forces, sits sad and lonely in between.
I recently came upon a quote from masterful British guerrilla artist Banks which said “the thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists”. It’s a striking statement, and I was reminded it of it while watching my regular dose of Monday night comedy, my singular obeisance to the TV schedule and the mainstream world.
Perhaps I was just very, very tired. But I was struck by the quality of the commercials, in relation not only to the content of the programmes, but also to so much video art, and a good portion of film. The reasons include Banksy’s observation, the sheer extravagance of commercial advertising budgets, and also, and perhaps most importantly, because every advert has a reason for existence, something that is patently not true for much of video art.
July was an extremely audiovisual month in the cultural life of Durban. There was the video-art show Dis-ease at Bank Gallery, The Fixed Frame Film Festival at the KwaSuka Theatre, a selection of video works by Columbian artist Carlos Motto at the KZNSA, and of course the ten-day long immersion in cinema that is the multi-venued Durban International Film Festival. By the end of all of this, there were some genuinely exhausted people.
The Film Festival continues to be one of the most important events on South Africa’s cultural calendar. It is the country’s only international film festival, and the Centre for Creative Arts, with the help of numerous sponsors, goes all out for the event. Hundreds of filmmakers, writers and administrators descend on the city for more than two hundred features, documentaries and shorts as well as a plethora of workshops. The finest of this year’s offering certainly functioned as the finest of fine art. And while I watched many of them on DVD rather than in the theatre – one of the consequences of being a critic – with the really great stuff, it actually doesn’t matter, because the medium disappears.
The same is not true of video art, though. I remember talking to the late Deryck Healey about the size and quality of the screen in video art. He spoke memorably about the immense power of seeing Robert Longo’s works projected onto walls several stories high, a power that the television screen could only ever diminish.
Of course, the focus on scale does not always hold true. There are many works that have successfully utilised small screens to maximum effect, including some of the work at the Bank Gallery’s Light Show earlier this year. But it’s true that the power of a lot of video work increases exponentially on the big screen, as demonstrated by the scale and quality of the actual projections of the Dis-ease show. I watched the work twice, once on the beautifully projected wall, and again on television for review, and the difference was remarkable.
While the big screen doesn’t deliver salvation to the weaker works, the finest of them really delivered the goods, the power of cinema transmuted into moving art-object. And I suspect that as projectors become increasingly cheaper and more powerful over the next decade, that there might be a giant shift in the ways that film is distributed and shown.
Finally, to pull a tangent into a circle, I
must mention the superb Bigwoods 3 show at ArtSpace Durban. The show featured a strong selection of the kind of cartoon-based illustrative work that many would not have welcomed into the definition of fine art a decade ago but which now populates the world’s galleries. I think this is due in no small part to Takashi Murakami and the superflat gang, and also to a global desire to escape from an increasingly grim world into one that might also be filled with certain flavours of darkness (the woods are always dark) but at least has softer corners.
I loved the show but it didn’t fit remotely into my introductory definition as to what I like. [But the content of the show, of which I reckon at least 80% hit its mark (including a ceiling height cardboard bunny rabbit from curator Trevor Paul) pointed to two curious things about the use of cartoon and comic-style. One is that it allows an extraordinarily large space for dissidence, and the other is the ease with which we allow ourselves to identify emotionally with characters that are often no more than a deftly drawn squiggle or a few roughly hewn flash animations. No need for the epic expanse of cinema here to achieve resonance.]
The exception to the exception was Richard Hart’s work. There’s a paradox here – since Hart’s paintings are on the some essential level illustrative. You can easily imagine them being lavished upon a beautifully rendered storybook. But at the same time, the work, like a film condensed into a single frame, moves out in all directions. Hart has been gracing group exhibitions occasionally with a few of his paintings over the last few years but will soon be having a solo show at whatiftheworld in Jozi. Look out for him.