The return of the art world jesters

Avant Car Guard are putting up a new exhibition. Mary Corrigall meets with the irreverent group and discovers that they prize freedom over convention

The Avant Car Guard (ACG) collective are not ideal candidates for an interview. For starters Zander Blom, Michael McGarry and Jan-Henri Booyens, the trio that constitute this irreverent group, are on a quest to undermine and interrogate the mechanics that drive the art world and interviewing is, after all, part of the machinery that elevates the artist, promulgating the status of the artist-genius. But it’s not just that ACG eschew the artist-genius tag and culture but they have already satirised the ubiquitous press interview in their work – long before they found themselves at the centre of attention. Titled Avant Car Guard at Home 1996 the trio are photographed seated at a table in front of microphones. Of course, a number of elements disrupt this mise-en-scène; the suburban garden in the background and the date in the title; in 1996 the trio were presumably still students. It’s not that they foretold their future but rather were representing the typical artist-genius narrative in which the artist is cast as a genius in retrospect. Our interview will no doubt cement their status too but it plays out under different conditions. Held up in Pretoria Booyens is absent and taking place at an outdoor café in Joburg it doesn’t resemble the constructed or artificial process their art work references.
Blom and McGarry are here to promote ACG’s up and coming solo at Whatiftheworld gallery in Cape Town but they also seem to relish the opportunity to expand on ACG’s ethos, which they say is so often adumbrated by the unruly nature of their art.
“We have kind of wanted to resist becoming the art world’s entertainment. We are always referred to as quirky, rabble-rousers; very few people engage with what we are saying,” notes McGarry.
The art of ACG has been compelled by a number of different ideas since they launched Volume I at Bell Roberts in December 2006. Though they found notoriety quickly with their derisive attacks on the South African art world, a period Blom terms their “bitchy phase”, their initial impetus was driven by a desire to destabilise notions of authorship. It wasn’t just a clichéd postmodern/Foucaultian compulsion; they genuinely couldn’t see themselves following the archetypal artist career path that would involve producing serious solo exhibitions every two years.
“You kind of feel like you are being cheated when you get caught in that cycle. There is no space to have fun. You make a whole bunch of shit and then you have product, it gets shown and then you make more shit. There is little fun in that,” observes Blom.
Experimenting in the context of a residency didn’t appeal to the trio either.
“That form of art making is also really lame because it doesn’t really deliver anything. Even in a residency where you put a whole lot of people together, you will find that everyone still want to put their own stamp on what you produce. It is cool to develop one thing,” asserts Blom.
ACG is like the product of an advertising or brand campaign, in which a team of people develop a powerful identity that is distinct from their own, they suggest.
“There is a branding and a concept that we work towards it’s an independent thing,” says Blom. Nevertheless Blom and McGarry are quick to assert that while ACG’s identity is independent of them, its essence is tied to them; in other words if one of them had to leave the collective, ACG would cease to exist.
Being part of ACG has freed them from the conventions that their individual expression is unable to afford them.
“We can say stuff with Avant Car Guard that we can’t and don’t necessarily want to say with our own stuff and because there are three of us the blame or the authorship is diluted. It’s also a bit lame to do that stuff by yourself,” says McGarry.

Working as a collective has had an impact not only on ACG’s aesthetic but their process too.
“It is a fast way of working; an idea happens quickly or goes away quickly, whereas if you are working by yourself you get stuck. You learn not to be precious. And you learn to take the piss out of yourself,” observes Blom.
The immediacy of their conceptual process obviously made photography an automatic choice as their primary mode of expression. Using a timer they take all their own pictures.
“It makes it more difficult but it makes our art more peformative in a way,” suggests McGarry.
“We prefer it to do it ourselves because we have grown used to being comfortable with just the three of us, the space between sitting and running has also created an effect,” proposes Blom.
Volume III, the title of their up-and-coming Whatiftheworld exhibition, will see the trio expand their distinctive idiom into the realm of painting.
“With the photographs we were always acting out some scenario, we would mimic an idea. In the painting we are not mimicking some situation we are working directly (with the subject),” says Blom.
“The process is totally different; we are perhaps acting out what a normal artist does,” comments McGarry
He also suggests that painting has developed the ACG aesthetic into a less figurative and one dimensional form of expression.
“Volume II was very much like looking at the art world and doing one liner cell based cartoon things that are activated by the title. We only directly attacked anyone with the “Berni Seal” (in reference to Berni Searle) photograph, but this show is very much about attacking the icons, its bigger and more fun. Not as one dimensional, the paintings are more lyrical and abstract,” says McGarry.
Despite their overt attempts at challenging the art world they have no desire to transform it; Blom and McGarry say they derive pleasure simply from creating satirical work.
“In a micro way in terms of how we are read as individuals or what young contemporary practice is, I think that we have changed the way we see it. If we did our solo work without Avant Car Guard it would be death,” observes McGarry.
Nevertheless, they don’t deny they have had an impact.
“It is difficult to imagine the art world without us,” says McGarry. But it’s not a comment born from arrogance; he suggests that “anybody could have been us we ended up being us, it’s healthy and it’s a sign that the hegemony that was around has relaxed. There are a lot more younger galleries and that power dynamic that was in place is no longer there anymore and you can shit on big names and nothing really happens anymore.”




• Volume III opens at
Whatiftheworld Gallery in
Cape Town on March 26