fried contemporary

EXHIBITION

Getting lost in the art of it all

June 14, 2007 Edition 1

Miranthe Staden-Garbett

Lost

ARTISTS: Willem Boshoff, Jan van der Merwe, Johan Conradie

VENUE: Fried Contemporary at 430 Charles Street, Brooklyn

TEL: 012-346-0158

DATE: Until June 30

The post-modern condition is characterised by extremes: excesses and emptiness. We carry the baggage of memories, perspectives, possessions, photographs, and names, more than we will ever know what to do with.

Our excesses are matched only by the nagging sense that something is missing, our fear of loss. We need look no further than our attachment to insurance schemes/scams. It seems the more there is, the more fearful one is of losing it. Alternatively, one could argue that the gain of one thing always results in the loss of another.

So what have we lost? What is it we want to hold on to? How do we remember? How will we be remembered? Memory has been a recurring theme in post-modern art and literature. From Anselm Kiefer to William Kentridge, the battle against forgetting has been waged on canvas and film.

A major trend in current art theory sees the artist as archivist, as guardian and interpreter of history. From blurred photographs to meticulous collection, documentation and mapping, expressionist and conceptual artist alike attempt to hold, however temporarily, the slippery tide of time, or to revel in its evasiveness. In different ways, these three artists explore lost time and places, a chorus of missing names and things.

Willem Boshoff's Bread-and-pebble road map, is what he calls a map to get lost by. This path, made of bread and stone, has biblical and mythical allusions. Paths are a record of choices made, bread or stone, life and death.

Inscribed with a catalogue of Arabic names and their meaning, Boshoff's remembering is a form of textual incantation, a writing of words that unveils hidden realities.

While I don't presume to know the workings of Boshoff's mind, I see his twin roles - sage and trickster - as perennial ones: keeping wisdom and keeping us all on our toes. He is a latter-day griot, a monk, a magician.

In Far far away, he traces a personal and cultural history, remembering the names of 1 142 children who died in concentration camps during the Anglo-Boer war, one of the wars in which his grandfather fought.

For Boshoff, the act of remembering is miraculous, through it lost or neglected worlds come into view, enter the present and have the potential to transform it.

Jan van der Merwe's reverse archaeology transforms current technologies into archaic relics, thus putting the viewer in the odd position of "remembering" the present. The disintegration of familiar things: letters, chairs, televisions, creates a time warp wherein I am faced with my own mortality.

His question is not so much what has been lost, but a more pressing, what are we losing? The compulsive folding of metal sheet paper planes in Killing Time suggests that it may be our sanity, our humanity.

The ultimate measure of loss is time, which is always being lost. Two responses to this are hope, which springs eternal, and sadness, that bottomless well. Johan Conradie dwells on the latter. Even our best attempts at freezing time - photographs, paintings, film - are subject to slippage.

Flip sides of the same coin, remember- ing and forgetting are skills which must both be learnt, and wisely applied.

This show expresses the romance of ruin, nostalgia and the politics and power of memory, but also hints at the redemptive potential of forgetting, that may follow remembering. Having learnt when and what to let go of, sometimes losing can be liberating.