Artists journey across the spectrum
Three very different shows reveal complex legacy
November 08, 2007 Edition 1
Miranthe Staden-Garbett
Apeek into the week ahead reveals art worlds apart. Rather than setting up camp in one, the opportunity to explore different approaches to art-making is here for the taking.
A sweeping glance at three exhibitions currently running reveals, on closer inspection, the complex legacy of over 100 years of modern art.
The effects of those disruptions, of content, form and function, are visible in the work of artists as diverse as Alice Elahi, Johan Thom, Marc Cloet and Phanuel Mabaso. The thread that connects these traditionally warring factions is that they all reflect the long-standing and ongoing project to integrate art with life.
It was the Impressionists in the late 1800s who first set out to capture life, still wriggling, on their canvas.
Their visual receptivity and passion for the direct transmission of visual experience have been posthumously problematised. But when faced with the windswept, sunkissed watercolours that grace Alice Elahi's studio and porch, one may thankfully relinquish the urge to look/feel/act clever, and simply partake in the magic transaction.
So in tune with her subject matter and medium, Elahi could paint a landscape blindfolded. She'd sniff the colours out, taste light and shadows, feel out the grain.
Her art is the product of an intimate and devoted relationship with the Namibian landscapes that draw her, and from which she draws inspiration, over and over again. As we hurtle down that fickle and fidgety superhighway, perpetually distracted, this is as good as any place to slow down and smell the roses.
The next stop is Charles Street, which is a very hard street to cross. Once you're on the other side, what awaits at Fried Contemporary may be even more challenging.
On the opening night of Bliss, featuring Johan Thom, Jackie McInnis and Belgian Marc Cloet, one viewer was heard to exclaim, upon being faced with one of the conceptual works, "Help. It's too high for me, I don't understand it."
Well, fair enough. But bear in mind it is in the nature of conceptual art to push boundaries and break the rules, not only of art, but of the way we think and act.
The cutting edge is not a stroll down Alice Elahi's porch. The challenge of it, however, is less in decoding the artist's inner memorandum than in examining one's own responses and preconceptions. "Crikey Moses!" was mine upon being leered at by Johan Thom's Ascension video. Then laughter. What's he up to? And more importantly, why?
In the Ascension video he's concocted a subliminal world, hysterical and banal. This world is a mad conglomeration of legitimate, recognisable stuff, rearranged to make it look scary and crazy. A parody of a parody, maybe, but it's so crazy you have to take him seriously. Thom would taunt and baffle us into awareness with Chappy wrappers and cheap tricks. His dialogue is part mystic, part schizophrenic. Armed with Doom, he patrols the dark crannies of our collective psyche.
Marc Cloet is a visiting Belgian philosopher/artist whose stark, minimalist objects point to pregnant silences that contain tenderness, fidelity and history. The work and its reception are seen as a serendipitous merging of moments. Cloet's explicit intent in this regard helps us to extend this concept to other art, even other contexts.
His anonymous objects are thus named because the artist declines sole responsibility or credit for what he sees as creative collaborations. The object flows into and out of the space and history it inhabits and creates.
Spaces of empathy, utopia, progression and hope, but also apathy, disability, impossibility. These are some of the abstract ideas that inform Cloet's work, beautiful but not necessarily available.
Fortunately, our last stop is more concrete. The PPC Young Concrete Sculptor Awards 2007 exhibition makes good on the idea that local and aspiring artists need to be supported.
The democratic medium provides an open playing field for all contenders and prizes are generously allocated according to various criteria.
Concrete, it turns out, is a versatile medium. Olaf Bischoff's concrete paintings and projection I know my way from here and Maria Coetzee's Domestic Goddess show the secret personality of concrete, light as air or smooth as ebony.
The winning work was Phanuel Mabaso's magnificent The reptile and amphibian collector, and other notable winners include Ruhan Janse van Vuuren, Henschel Herselman and Jessica le Grange.
When all is said and done though, don't expect the secret connections between art and life to be served up with the free drinks and snacks on a garnished silver platter.