Vuyisa Nyamende's 'Japan'
by Zachary Yorke
Vuyisa Nyamende's exhibition, 'Japan', includes several mixed media collages, most stuck directly onto the gallery wall, and a three-hour video, both of which use popular images to construct linear and non-linear narratives. The roughly edited video was created spontaneously, sitting in front of the television, editing with the record-button. This process presents a problem. The work doesn't deliver what it seems to promise: something in the conceptual neighbourhood of critiquing or re-appropriating popular culture. Although it does re-appropriate by placing music videos in a gallery context, it does so in a superficial way.
One searches for the artist's intention amongst the standard fare of sex and violence. One can draw out narratives and sub-themes from the juxtaposition of images, but will probably struggle to differentiate this experience from that of watching television at home. The work, in short, risks becoming a record of Nyamende's experience of watching television at home.
The exhibition's title derives from an analogy that Nyamende explains thus: "Japan is the land of the rising sun, and I am a rising star." His playful juxtaposition of 'sun' and 'star' mirrors the aesthetics of his collage. Also apparent, is the way Nyamende inserts himself into narratives, using imagination and spontaneity to fragment and reconstruct. Again, however, this spontaneous process seems in need of a counter balance. The compositions are mostly static; they seem to rely on the appropriated images, mainly cut from popular magazines, to stimulate the viewer. This is our cue to look at the images as concepts. Nyamende's engagement with concepts is incomplete.
Food Court, for example, juxtaposes images of gourmet food with images of starving Africans, which I can only read as a vapid comment on global inequality. Don't You Know I'm Loco presents us with a pastiche of frightening baboon teeth, fight scenes, Mohammed Ali reading Psychological Warfare, sumo wrestling, and rappers in shiny cars. Jackson Pollock also appears above text that reads, "When I get Jack to Rippya."
This last work is more compelling for the way it speaks to the intersection of violence and absurdity. Here also, we can more clearly see that this work is about fun, the delight of finding interesting pictures in magazines, cutting and pasting, allowing the imagination run wild. Similarly, Nyamende uses Ed Young's 'Asshole' graffiti from the previous exhibition at Bell-Roberts to tell a comic story about the biggest Asshole on Earth. However, despite its cleverness, it seems little more than an inside-joke for Cape Town's art world.
In Battlefield Earth, we see soldiers from different parts of the world, a Jasper Johns Flag, Kim Jong Il and George W. Bush and text, all of which seem to tell a story that parodies war. Discernible intention allows us to access, to engage. Throughout the exhibition, Nyamende uses humour to make weighty issues lighter and to create visual situations that reveal the absurdity of things.
This works, to the extent that spontaneity finds balance with intentionality, to the extent that the weight of intentionality provides support for the absurd and the ironic. If such a formalist critique fails to appreciate the aesthetics of incompleteness, the complexity of contemporary South Africa's blurred boundaries, or the subtleties of subversive artistic choices, then a greater effort is needed to articulate those complexities, that subtlety. Even the most extreme mysticism does not remain avant-garde forever: the process of explaining it either gives it a label other than 'art', or it creates a small revolution. Nyamende's 'Flash Art Revolution' has not yet been born. The discursive battles will have to come first.
Zachary Yorke is a visiting research scholar from the USA, currently researching contemporary artistic production in South Africa.
