Ultra-red at the KZNSA Gallery
by Carol Brown
Relatively few visitors to the KZNSA Gallery, for its recent transformation at the hands of activist collective Ultra-red, would have recognized the allusion to the historical Cage-Rauschenberg collaboration which took place in 1952. Robert Rauschenberg produced his White Paintings, uniform layers of white paint on large canvases, as the conceptual and aesthetic backbone of the event. These became the impetus for composer John Cage to complete a project which he had conceptualised some years before but not been able to realise: the controversial 4'33'.
During this piece, a pianist sits at a piano and does not play, resulting in four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. The white paintings and the silent music worked to sharpen perception of both sound and sight and to allow space for contemplation. This presentation was the response of the American artists to the end of the Second World War and the appearance of the Atom Bomb which, as we know, changed the world forever.
Ultra-red's installation, anagrammatically titled Silent: Listen, transformed the KZNSA into a clinical white space which both challenged and confused visitors.
Founded in 1994 and based in Los Angeles, Ultra-red deals with a range of social issues including housing and Aids. The group utilizes sound-based research to directly engage with the political struggle, pursuing a dynamic exchange between art and politics by using radio broadcasts, performances, recordings and installations. Recent interventions have taken place in some high-profile gallery spaces such as the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Tate Britain.
Here Ultra-red comprised Eddie Peel from Florida's electronic music scene; Dont Rhine, co-founder of the collective, who has worked with groups such as ACT UP, Clean Needles Now and Pride at Work and is an artist and teacher seeking to develop a sound-art theory and practice; and Robert Sember whose initial degree was from the UKZN Dept of Drama and who currently teaches at the University of California Los Angeles. Sember is also co-curator of Make Art/Stop Aids exhibition and a researcher for Hivan in KwaZulu-Natal.
At the KZNSA, geometrically-spaced tables covered with white cloths were offset only by the pure white of stark canvases in the gallery. The effect was one of erasure of context, but also contained a gesture towards the bureaucratic mechanisms with which the modern world is terrifyingly familiar.
The random and insistent voices which could be heard through speakers, breaking the silence of the room, reinforced the notion of the nameless and unheard, whose utterances remain unheeded in the white noise of this referenced bureaucracy.
It is the catastrophic period of the world's induction into the atomic age which resonates in this 21st Century 'reconstruction' of the Cage-Rauschenberg event. Yet, the catastrophe alluded to here is a contemporary one - the Aids epidemic, described by writer Paula Treichler as an 'epidemic of signification'. Her thesis is that the phenomenon is cultural and linguistic as well as bio-medical. As such, she argues, we need to employ our intelligence and critical faculties to assist in developing policy and articulating social needs. The scope and magnitude of the Aids epidemic is unprecedented in the history of illness, and new strategies need to be found to understand it. Aids has a complexity which challenges many levels of institutional and civic society, and it is against this backdrop that Ultra-red casts its interrogation of the issue.
In South Africa, we have been victims for many years of poor policy-making, inefficient responses and even apathy and ignorance. The confused and repetitive sounds of recorded statements in the installation by Aids activists, organisers, researchers, artists and people living with HIV/Aids remind us of this - despite the fact that the audio material Ultra-red has used is from North America and Europe.
The placement of this type of activist installation in a gallery space, effectively blurring the boundaries of what art is expected to be, follows Cage and Rauschenberg's initiative. The seminal American artists leveraged the idea that gallery spaces are comparable to temples where time is suspended and contemplation invited whilst the outside world is sealed off. In this model, the viewer is able to suspend him/herself in a space which both removes reality and simultaneously heightens perceptions.
There is a double dynamic at play in this particular installation in that the references to the Cage- Rauschenberg project are obscure to the average visitor to the gallery and the American voices distance the project even more. These intellectual shifts place the discourse within a wider framework than much of the recent artwork around Aids to which we in South Africa have been exposed. Tendencies have been to localize the dominant issues; however, this particular intervention poses, on a global level, questions of how decisions are made and by whom. The questions of who listens, who speaks, and who understands are ones that concern bureaucratic structures and policy makers in a wider historical and geographical context.
For those gallery visitors (and possibly it was a minority) who were able to engage with the installation, it set up important issues of enquiry. One cannot help considering however that, as the work is a record of a public process, it would have been more meaningful if there had been more public participatory events held in Durban to coincide with the show. A comment was made that the American voices removed the audience from a level of horror which would have been almost unbearable. But maybe this made the point of the show a bit too obscure; either way, it could have been used to greater effect had there been serious workshopping and participation.
Opens: September 16
Closes: October 12
The KZNSA Gallery
166 Bulwer Road, Glenwood, Durban
Tel: (031) 202 3686
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