'Urban Scenographies' at the Drill Hall in Joubert Park
by Anthea Buys
The Joubert Park Project (JPP), an artists' collaborative group headed up by Dorothee Kreutzfeldt and Joseph Gaylard, brought their long tenure at the Drill Hall in Joubert Park to a close in March with a public art residency project called 'Urban Scenographies'. Curated in collaboration with Parisians Francoise Duconseille and Jean-Christophe Lanquetin of ScU≤, 'Urban Scenographies' is an itinerant curatorial model that involves a number of artists - in its Johannesburg instance, close to sixty all counted - from African and European countries residing in a host city for a month. At the end of this stay the artists produce public artwork that offers some revelatory, critical or change-inducing reading of the local urban environment. So far the residency has been held in Douala, Kinshasa, Alexandria and Johannesburg.
The curatorial mandate for the project proposed four key frames or metaphors through which artists might interpret the context and dynamics of the Johannesburg inner city. These were 'the field of play', 'the ground of battle', 'the space of the stage' and 'the place of the market'. What unified these four scopic paths was the idea that the artists would produce works that were site-specific. The term 'site-specific' is pegged onto just about every contemporary art production in the public sphere, as if just by executing an artwork in a place (as opposed, perhaps, to executing it in a non-place?) it were automatically site-specific. The notion of site-specificity adopted in 'Urban Scenographies' was, however, more carefully hewn.
The assumption that seemed to drive this project was that within one short month an artist who spends enough time walking the streets and talking to their inhabitants will be sufficiently acquainted with an urban environment to produce a work that either facilitates a new and meaningful relational dynamic within that environment, or uses the existing material, imagery and cultural languages of the city to say something with broader political or philosophical meaning. However, only very few of the works that emerged from this project responded directly and sensitively to their chosen sites, and were in fact dependent on their locations for their meaning.
Unathi Sigenu's Unauthorised Jacket was one such work. In this process Sigenu patrolled a crowded building run by slumlords wearing a modified police jacket and reporting to an unidentified 'colleague' over a two-way radio. This intervention was very much rooted in its location, a place where the threat of violence and crime governs how many of the tenants live daily, as the nub of the work lay in testing how these living dynamics would change with the introduction of a police presence.
Michelle Harris's Dr Hoer genuinely 'intervened' in the fabric of daily life in a similar way. Harris, playing a woman herbalist, girded herself in pink foam and gold glitter and a round of pink sausage-like objects, and took to the taxi ranks and streets touting herbal remedies specifically to help women with problems like PMS, gender discrimination in the city and domestic abuse. Many men, who had heckled her along the way, were genuinely embarrassed or offended when confronted with her wares.
However, some of the works produced, as seductive and entertaining as they may have been, used the city as a fairly arbitrary backdrop for the staging of spectacle. IngridMwangiRobertHutter, a couple who practice as one artist, staged a living monument march (Urban Tree Monument,) that moved from the Drill Hall to the Supreme Court on Pritchard Street. When the destination was reached the thirty or forty participants in the march lay silently on the floor in a circle. This was meant to be a gesture of empathy for those who had been victims of xenophobic violence during the outbreak of attacks on foreign nationals in South Africa last year, and echoed the built monument to these victims which stands outside one side of the court. The exercise generated much curiosity and some bystanders seemed genuinely moved by the performance.
After a good ten minutes on the floor, bits of the monument began to stand up and brush off their clothes. A desperate mob gathered around the defaulters and tried to persuade them to part with the T-shirts the artists had printed for all participants. Eventually the shirts were redistributed and most of the monument began its trek back to the Drill Hall. Meanwhile Ingrid Mwangi, one half of the artist, persisted in lying on the floor, her fists clenched and her face buried in the pavement. To me, this phase of the performance became a test of Mwangi's own stamina, a display of her own empathy or moral scruples, and completely lost sight of the premise of the work or the specificity of its context. This was no longer 'site-specific' in any legitimate sense of the concept; its allusion to a unique 'ground of battle', had swung swiftly to a personal indulgence in the city as 'stage'or a backdrop for the artist's own persona and agenda.
The inclusion of the metaphor of the stage in the curatorial frame is unconvincing, precisely because it seems to allow this type of slippage very easily. It's potentially an easy out for a work that has gone stale or missed a beat and made a passive 'audience' out of its human context.
Anthea Buys is a Johannesburg-based writer who works for the Mail & Guardian as an art journalist.
Opens: 12 Mach
Closes: 15 March
Drill Hall
1st Floor West Block, Drill Hall Precinct, Plein Street, Joubert Park, Johannesburg
Tel: (011) 333 1112
Email: info@jpp.org.za
www.jpp.org.za
Hours: Mon - Fri 2pm - 5pm, Sat 10am - 2pm
