The Art Cowboy

By Peter Machen

There was something just vaguely apocalyptic going on at ArtSpace Durban this August in the group show Formation. Featuring four of Durban’s most talented painting talents – Grace Kotze, Dee Donaldson, Anet Norval and Janet Solomon – and curated by Kotze, the show attempted to give the viewer an insight into the physical and psychological process of producing works using text, photographs and sketches.
On one level – that of technical virtuosity where the art viewer looks carefully at the brush strokes and declares the actual level of competence of the painter, like a scientist analysing a blood sample – the show succeeds admirably. But it does so, in fact, because that level was invisible, as virtuosity always should be. You become transfixed by the song not the singer, by the painting not the paint.
And indeed I was transfixed by the fusion of narratives and emotion on display, so much so that the medium itself became irrelevant. The work on show in Formation were paintings, but they might just as eaily have been cinema or video art or installations or memories or dreams. And even when I started doing the blood analysis thing – with Janet Solomon’s staggeringly detailed Susanna – its ominousness and otherworldly depiction of an incredibly natural landscape kept on pulling me back out to the big picture.
I have to say, though, that I wasn’t that engaged by the documentations of how the work was formed. That may simply be the philistine in me talking, or it may be that the works were all so strong, said so much, that I didn’t want to see the invisible strings that held everything together. It might also be the case that the documentation would – strangely enough – have been more gripping without the presence of the final artwork.
With its fusion of brooding 21st century urban landscapes, naked human bodies and verdant nature, it’s tempting to suggest from the collective work, including Jacki Bruniquel’s work in the rest of the gallery in which she chronicles the destruction of the natural landscape in Umdlhoti, that man is the apocalypse and woman the edenic state. But I’m not actually going to say that, except to ramble on about the fact that sometimes things can be both true and untrue, and that sometimes it’s okay to leave an unmediated thought hanging in the air. But the tensions that exist between the urban virus and the planet’s natural state – which is, even with all the crime and violence and recession, our most contemporary concern – were beautifully and hauntingly expressed at ArtSpace – without any need – or desire – to be even remotely didactic.
Sometimes it also okay to leave extremely mediated thoughts hanging in the air. Greg Streak’s cloud from his gorgeously minimal but deeply felt Accumulative Disintegration exhibition at Bank Gallery was one of the most powerful art objects I’ve encountered this year. An inverted arc, much like the blade of a herb-cutter, hung from the ceiling, it bottom surface covered entirely in razor blades. The work power exists on many layers and dimensions, but its strongest feature was a kind of inverted vertigo, the feeling of being gravitationally attracted to the blades. It would be easy to complain about the brutality of the piece, to write it off as yet another exercise in masculine cruelty. But to do so would be to ignore the fact that we live in a reality, that while full of joy, is also extremely brutalised. And Streak is clearly also hurting, as evidenced by the moving work called Envelopes For Tears, composed of hundreds of little envelopes made from electrical tape. The rest of the work also impressed, but what lingers most in mind was how the exhibition melded itself to the gallery space and the space to the work. It was as if the gallery itself has acquired a living breathing skin, and was experiencing the pain of the world. As for the joy of the world, there were hints of it but they were outside the room shining in. Inside only beauty illuminated. And beauty is not joy, despite the special relationship they share.
Finally, check out the astounding group show Production Marks which is currently on exhibition at the Goethe Institut in Pretoria, having just shown at the KZNSA Gallery. Curated by the gallery’s Brenton Maart, the work which explores the relationships between art, geometry and architecture, opened to much acclaim in Grahamstown earlier this year.
Don’t miss out on this startling and uxexpected mix of national talent. And even if you’ve already seen the show, Maart’s curatorial talents will no doubt ensure that in a new space, the exhibition will be born anew.