'Lift Off Part I' at Goodman Gallery Cape
by Tavish McIntosh
'Lift Off Part I''s line-up reads like an index of established South African artists. From William Kentridge to Willie Bester, it's the dream show for first year Art History students wanting to catch up on who's who - and those who are not represented in the show make vicarious appearances in Nhlengethwa's satirical canvas Sold Out. Nhlengethwa's prescient comment on the commodification of art in the gallery notwithstanding, wading my way through the hordes at the opening I felt the show lacked a critical spark.
Perhaps it was the preponderance of archetypal Robert Hodgins works in the entrance, or Willie Bester's monumental Trojan Horse III that bore down upon the arriving visitors with a didactic solemnity, forcing all who entered to stare down the barrels of many guns that erupted from its flanks. At the opening, gallerist Linda Givon expressed the wish that the Trojan Horse should be led through the streets of Cape Town in a massive parade - and I heartfeltly echoed her wish. The piece is so sombrely political that it belongs in the pomp and ceremony of a public institution; its didactic message allows no room for the playful interpretation that is so much a part of the interaction between viewer and artwork.
Subsequently, I was able to look beyond these pieces and digest the rest of the show, and in the process realised the depth and quality of many of the pieces. Whilst Kendell Geers' Sainte Vierge drawings and Penny Siopis' Mercy painting are others that employ an abrasive visual language, their ability to sidestep the institutional sombreness of Bester's monumental sculptures allows the viewer greater scope. Siopis repeated a technique from her 'Passions and Panics' show at the Johannesburg Goodman, with the harshly discordant materials - large mass-produced red plastic chain with mixed media on paper painting - literally melting into each other. The plastic chain becomes the hair upon the subject's head. Despite Siopis' rich aesthetic sensibility, these are pieces that repel easy consumption. Siopis embraces the brash redness of the chain and juxtaposes that with the clashing pock-marked pinkness of the subject's body. Jerked backwards by the chains which scribble 'mercy' across the wall, the pale female figure is overwhelmed by the metaphoric weight of a legacy of patience, charity and mercy, the conditions of femininity.
Kendell Geers' Sante Vierge series of large-scale drawings in black ink raised questions of their own about the constitution of femininity. The two pieces are starkly graphic in style and content, both depicting pornography's metaphoric 'money shot'. In an interesting twist, Sainte Vierge 55 is listed as not for sale - despite adopting the language of pornography, an industry underpinned by the commodification of provocative display. Geers protects the substance of the image as a pure white blank space by carefully outlining it in black ink. The control necessary for this technique of working up the negative spaces belies the apparent spontaneity of the pooled, splattered and splashed black areas, and within this visual anomaly rests the piece's force. The white figure is both constituted and confined by the rough dispersal of black ink, which echoes spurts of eager seminal fluid unable to find their mark. The figure is an impossible fantasy culled from the pages of Hustler, but it is also a framework against which femininity as an ideal is created.
David Goldblatt's photograph 4_10013 focuses on the immense billboards depicting scantily clad females luxuriating in silk sheets that dominate the streets of Sandton. Aimed at alluring the drivers-by, the billboards are larger than life and stretch for blocks on end, turning the streets of the city into vast fantasylands. In this image Goldblatt uses bland tones that completely undermine the richly shaded posters and carefully frame the billboards with the cityscape that they seek to disguise. The unhappy fracture between commodified fantasy and urban reality is made all the more apparent by the pairing of this image with 4_9958 depicting another side of the same city, the poverty-stricken Alexandra Township of Johannesburg bedecked with gravestones.
Kagiso Pat Mautloa's Crutch shows this artist's abilities as a colourist, collaging found objects with his darkly purple and red background. William Kentridge contributed small prints from his Bird Catching series which are delightfully light and assured. However, his larger watercolours felt somewhat lacklustre. From the corner, Sue Williamson and Norman Catherine mounted a harsh indictment of Jacob Zuma's antics. Williamson's understated prints are memorials to a lost ideal of democracy, as she counts down the news stories until the vice-president's alleged rape victim hastily flees these shores. Catherine's sculpture Red Bull Gives You Zooma is another iconic Catherine piece, filled with disturbing Freudian significance. The winged creature with both a knife in its back and a muzzle upon its phallic nose devilishly awaits release.
'Lift Off Part I' is the Goodman Gallery Cape's inaugural show, and as such it affords us a glimpse into the aims of the gallery here. These are notable - Goodman Gallery Cape manifests a new national ambition in commercial gallery spaces, promising to bridge the narrow regionalism of much of our art awareness. One of the cleaning staff explained to me that 'the gallery is like a museum' - and the truth of his statement struck me. Goodman Gallery Cape is poised to become one of the hallmark institutions of Cape Town.
Opens: March 22
Closes: April 28
Goodman Gallery Cape
3rd Floor Fairweather House, 176 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock
Tel: (021) 462 7573
Fax: (021) 462 7579
Email: info@goodmangallerycape.com
Hours: Tue - Fri 9.30am - 5.30pm, Sat 10am - 4pm
