Eclectic mix of media, messages and motifs

Pretoria News, July 20, 2006 Edition 1

Miranthe Staden-Garbett

In celebration of their first anniversary, Fried Gallery has put together a selection of works by 12 of their favourite contemporary South African artists.

As with recent group shows in Pretoria, it's an eclectic, potentially chaotic mix, in which consistency of style, medium or theme is not a priority.

While this is a reflection of local diversity and a fragmented post-modern context, I keep hoping, perhaps naïvely, that we may find ways of getting over that hurdle toward a semblance of integration.

In the meantime, the participating artists have not surrendered to the post-modern abyss of meaninglessness.

For the most part they have some important agendas up their sleeves.

These include the treatment of themes such as the oppressive gaze and female subservience, tourism as neo-colonialism, illness, death and transience, historical and ecological appropriations, political displacement and the ills of westernisation.

That is perhaps what ties an otherwise disparate selection, the choice of artists who communicate as sense of social and political awareness.

That said, Nathaniel Stern while also sometimes engaging in serious themes, manages to retain an inventive mischievousness.

This, and the fact that he isn't bound to any one style or message, makes him one of the more interesting South African artists around today.

Take for instance the hilarious Nathaniel, hector, X, in which three versions of the same person sit and move around a table, muttering inaudibly, self-consciously vying for the camera's attention each in their own eccentric way.

The decision to put Wilma Cruise's Role over in such close proximity to Stern's projection strikes me as a curatorial lapse of reason, or else an act of inspired absurdity.

Their only shared ground is that they feature chairs of some sort or another, yet the disturbing presence of Cruise's mammoth female figure brandishing an enormous panty, really hampers one's enjoyment of Stern's farcical multiple personality charade.

This of course is not an appropriate response to Cruise's serious feminist statement on subservience, and that is exactly the problem.

Wendy Morris' Taste the world is also awkwardly placed in a narrow passageway, which does not do justice to the viewing of this accomplished animation.

While comparisons with William Kentridge are probably unavoidable, due to fact they work using a similar method and with similar themes, Morris' work is sufficiently different from his to be brilliant in its own right.

Morris, born in South Africa, now resides in Belgium, but her interests belie her post-colonial heritage.

Taste the world shows us the ways in which Africa is fetishised and consumed by 'Eurostocrats' who commodify the Third-World holiday package.

The approach of the tourist is immediately antagonistic toward the other, and efforts are made immediately to make its foreignness more palatable.

Necessary protection includes a knife that becomes a gun that becomes a candle lit to St Christopher, and a hamburger is just the trick for a homesick tourist.

The attempt to tame, or entirely circumvent the stereotypical wildness of the other by means of postcards, photographs and curios are somewhat hindered as strange creepers threaten to encroach on and undermine the smooth order of things.

Diane Victor's Emperor's New Clothes series is superbly executed. In an ingenious marriage of medium and message, Victor has created drawings of HIV/Aids sufferers with smoke, an apt expression of life being extinguished.

I found Leora Farber's Nemisis II installation of photographs quite oppressive.

Those giant close-ups of Farber in her grotesque designer skin suit, poised endlessly in the mock act of sewing herself up simply does not do justice to the artist's interesting ideas or Strangelove's designer skin suit.

On the other hand, the timid stitching of serviettes by Senzani Marasela pose an equally ominous and dreadful reality with an infinitely more subtle, humble hand.

Part of a series titled Theordora in Johannesburg, these stitched images tell the story of the artist's mother's first encounter with Johannesburg.

A woman sits placidly on a bed while in the background the faint blue outlines of men are beating someone up.

The motif of an African woman balancing parcels on her head, of being in permanent transit, subservience and displacement are beautifully expressive in Mara-sela's ultra-naïve style.

Displacement is also the theme of Zimbabwean-born Kudzanai Chiurai, whose unique style incorporates graffiti, resistance posters and other anti-establishment strategies.

Other artists include Bongi Bengu, Adele Oldfield, Frikkie Eksteen, Penny Siopis and Carine Zaayman.