The New Spell - An Exhibition of Contemporary South Africa Art
by Sean Slemon
The New Spell, which opened at David Krut Projects in New York in June, is a group show featuring the work of six emerging South African artists - Themba Shibase, Michael MacGarry, Nandipha Mntambo, Maja Maljevic, and Robyn Nesbitt in collaboration with Nina Barnett. As curator Lucy Rayner's first international curatorial project, the show is a significant event for South African emerging art as part of an ongoing effort to gain recognition beyond the domestic audience. Conversely, home audiences often need to be cued by responses from those abroad to realise the worth of their local talent.
The exhibition endeavours to interrogate the emergence of both a subversive, vulgar aesthetic and a suspected satiric shift in tone within recent South African art. With a sense of humour and detachment the artists respond to the improvisation and excessiveness so prevalent within official culture in South Africa. With the work of only six artists, most of them lesser-known in the international context, this presents itself as a fairly ambitious curatorial goal.
Shibase's Wena Wendlovu series comprises two large canvases entitled Big Al and Taylor the Dictator and Thief depicting African leaders Muammar al Gaddafi and Charles Taylor, the leader of The National Patriotic Front of Liberia, now in detention in an international criminal court on charges of war crimes. The phrase 'Wena Wendlovu' is a Zulu greeting, meaning 'Great Elephant', used as a gesture of respect, but here clearly used with an ironical intention. These paintings are deliberately bizarre, rendering their subjects somewhat undersized or diminutive. Their shadowy backgrounds remove context - leaving them only in the clothes they wear, and the quirky chairs on which they sit. Despite capturing a relatively keen physical likeness Shibase eschews realism in favour of a certain freedom of style. Taylor seems disheartened, while a sunglassed Gaddafi retains his poise as he demonstrates his willingness to open up Libya.
MacGarry exhibits photographic inkjet prints of his own sculptures within scenes that he has crafted. These works are both strange and sensitive. They have an absurdist flavour, consistent with a good deal of current European and North American work, but draw on Africa and what MacGarry calls, 'the ongoing ramifications of imperialism within the African context' as their subject. Functioning well collectively, it is difficult to discuss MacGarry's works in isolation. Recurring subject matter works to subtly connect MacGarry's pieces across the various media such as sculpture and photography. For instance, we recognise his industrial foam sculpture, The Economy of Modernity featured as a prop in the The Classicist from the photographic series African Archetypes. In other photographs such as The Father (Reversal of Fortune) MacGarry, clothed in suit and tie, wears a grey-painted wooden mask. In Spiderman he stands atop a Johannesburg building, the wooden mask replaced by a brown paper bag with eight holes for eyes. Have both identities been removed? And does Spiderman require a disguise in our society? I ask these questions because the works effectively play the line between being suitably ambiguous and exceptionally pointed in their comments.
A photograph of a white duvet cover, La Tenda Rossa still eludes me. Translated from the Italian meaning “The Red Tent” and evoking Duchamp's Fountain in shape and singularity, its form is once again reminiscent of The Economy of Modernity. Both pieces echo the absurdity of the contemporary international art market, as well as the way simple things can become signifiers for bigger ideas.
Mntambo's works are doing the rounds, and they fit well here. Her prints Silent Embrace 1 and 2 may not be as impressive as the sculptures themselves but they are an economic approach to obtaining a broader audience. Mntambo states 'While these fragments of female form may illicit repulsion, it is repulsion intended to evoke the residue of life'. This idea is best communicated by the hides themselves, where the texture, smell and corporeality of the beast can be directly experienced by the viewer. The images do however do well to evidence Rayner's threads of the grotesque and sublime weaved throughout the exhibition.
Maljevic's portraits Pretty Monsters (Yesterday's parrot) and (in triplicate) run along the lines of free association and successfully explore the notion of the monster/guardian. Whether they fit comfortably on the show or not, I am undecided. Her works do not deal with anything specifically African or South African on the same level that the other works do. They are universal, and cannot be confined to a space except that of humanity and its limitations. And why should they, given that Maljevic is from Belgrade and has been in South Africa for only several years?
The most chilling work on the show is Warcry by Nesbitt and Barnett. Anyone who went to a white, middleclass school in South Africa will either love and enjoy this work, or be subjected to frightening memories of their disciplined childhood. Warcries are a longstanding tradition held by schools still caught up in a colonial fog. It's a way of engendering a compulsory sense of camaraderie and school spirit. Filmed from behind the heads of 'prefects' (another colonial leftover), we see 600 students screaming an un-intelligible song. The boys perform in a fierce, combative manner whereas the girls are more playful, but at the same time surprisingly ferocious.
Well done to Rayner on her first curatorial venture abroad. A small show that is well directed and accompanied by a considered catalogue. 'The New Spell' is a high-quality exhibition with a well selected group of artists, providing some interesting insights into some of South Africa's most successful emerging art.
David Krut Projects
526 West 26th St., New York
Tel: +1 (212) 255 3094
Fax: +1 (212) 400 2600
Email: info@davidkrut.com
www.davidkrut.com
