Power Play at Goodman Gallery Cape
by Tavish McIntosh
There's been some talk of the dynamics of the exodus from the city by Cape Town galleries. Now Michael Stevenson, Bell-Roberts and Goodman Gallery Cape are within a stone's throw of each other, with whatiftheworld / Gallery just out of reach. What is perhaps most noteworthy of this power play is how each of them is building up a dynamic interaction with their new location. Against this background Goodman Gallery Cape is struggling to define itself against the pull of its Johannesburg counterpart and it is doing this by staging shows like 'Power Play' which seek to interact with the specificity of its location in Woodstock. And if art is to play a role outside of filling the pockets of its practitioners and curators, we need more shows that go beyond the aesthetics espoused by modernism and which actively engage the painful politics of our country.
Performance art, despite having been an active component of contemporary practice since the 1960s and 70s, continually marks out the gallery space as a site for disruption and intervention. And so it was performance and performativity that underpinned the curatorial choices for 'Powerplay'.
Anthea Moys' performance Deur Mekaar in Cape Town was a perspicacious intervention into a town still wracked by the xenophobic attacks on foreigners. In a skimpy bikini, and waving a rainbow-coloured umbrella, Moys brought together a group of performers on the roof of a neighbouring building. As she fought off the dramatic winds of Cape Town, she ushered in a troupe of District Six Hanover Minstrels, a brass Street Band and singer Everton Nsumbu. Rather than the polished pieces of drama-trained performance artists that we have become accustomed to, Moys managed to inject the location with her unpretentious energy and enthusiasm, lending the interaction between the players and the audience a fresh dynamic. For once, a performance piece was less about the drama of theatre, engaging and activating the apathetic audience, and more about the internal structure of performance. The troupe's Goodman Gallery Cape frilly umbrellas were a dab touch at the role of the gallery in the production and consumption of the performance.
The often awkward interaction between a performance and a static display was somewhat ameliorated by some astute curatorial work that brought the theme of performance back into the gallery. Hasan and Husain Essop's performative photographs dominated the entrance of the exhibition, along with the Brown European Pageant, a video produced by Jean and Zinaid Meeran. This provided an easy entry point for the audience. The Essop twins exhaustively repeated their successful formula for photographic representations of identity in play. For this, they exploit the oppositions between contemporary youth culture and the traditions of Islam. The images are bright, colourful and fun compositions that make the most of the current fashion for identity parades.
From behind this profusion of colour, Anthea Moys' performances were documented on a television monitor and by still photographs. The low-tech monitor, with its informal viewing couch, reiterated Moys' blithe disregard for the work's affective presence, focusing one's attention again on the internal dynamics of the mock-serious situations that she precipitates.
Alongside this, Moshekwa Langa's Untitled series of lithographs lined the back wall of the gallery and lent conceptual weight to the entire show. Very different from his drawings that we saw here last year, these lithographs are composed in dark, solemn tones that visually tie together the disparate sources from which he culls his imagery. The sombre hues also have another role, the blues, rusts and umbres that he employs lend the imagery a certain solemnity, pointing to the artist's critical distance from the images he displays. For me, all the images stayed anonymous and their sources unclear. Nonetheless a sense of recognition struck me through the series, perhaps because their disparate imagery puts the strange dynamics of South African media culture and society at large into focus. The images of rugby players with the famed Gilbert ball from a signed poster sit uncomfortably next to an image of a crowded group of women staring resignedly at the camera as it images their current plight. The unself-conscious rugby players intent on their game, a man whose eyes have been blinded by the collaging of another image of someone else's over his, the self-possession of the women confronting the alien lens, cumulatively showcase different levels of self-construction and presentation.
'Power Play' allowed the Goodman Gallery Cape to stake out a unique territory for itself in the burgeoning Woodstock neighbourhood by taking on the challenges of creating and displaying socially relevant art in a still commercially viable gallery package. The exhibition brings together a group of promising young artists, all intent on engaging the contemporary dynamics of power and privilege. It all makes for interesting and provocative viewing. Although I was sceptical of Linda Givon's blithe promise to uplift Woodstock with her gallery, it does seem that the Cape Town Goodman Gallery is orientating itself towards its surroundings like no other gallery entering the area (although whatiftheworld has been singularly successful in changing the dynamics of the area with its popular Saturday market).
Opens: June 5
Closes: June 30
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
