Grad show season. It’s my favourite time of year. The mood is that of Saturnalia: out with the old, in with the new. Moreover, art students reliably produce what is, for better or worse, my favourite kind of work: wacky, weird, tenuously assembled and occasionally wonderful. Throughout December, I visited the graduate exhibitions of four art schools––Cape Town Creative Academy (CTCA), Michaelis, Ruth Prowse, and Stellenbosch. I observed some of the usual suspects. (Bedraggled tapestries! Amorphous ceramics! Objects suspended from fish gut! Fragments on the floor!) I made note of trends. (Mounds of soil! Videos projected on bedsheets! Found domestic objects bent and twisted and smashed together in such a way that they were made to sing of their violences!) There were plenty of outstanding contributions too.
CTCA had, in my view, the best presentation overall, not least because they can count among their graduates Kamyar Bineshtarigh and Vusumzi Nkomo, who showed strong presentations at the professional level recently with Southern Guild, AVA and THK, respectively. In terms of new kids on the block, I loved Athene Azure Hage’s hymns for fragility, a pile of beads rolled from clay and rooibos leaves; Shalner Ching’s Pristine, hotel bath sheets stained with District Six clay; and Cara Biederman’s John Berger If He Was a Girl, a painting that captures perfectly (and yet subverts!) the seminal Ways of Seeing adage, “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”
For this cohort, what stood out most prominently to me was the students’ deft ability to think conceptually. Alia’s wudhu looked like a cobblestoned street that had erupted as if by earthquake. But the cobblestones were not cobblestones; they were handfuls of grass mixed with cake flour and stiffened together with tile adhesive and grout. Alia was kind enough to tell me a story about the grass in question. Her grandfather once worked as a gardener for a white family who owned one of those high-walled, green-lawned homes that pervaded the Southern Suburbs of Cape Town following the era of forced removals. Alia went to the same home, now under new ownership, and asked if she could mow the lawn. The owners were perplexed, but acquiesced, and Alia was free to collect the grass she’d shorn, the same grass her grandfather had shorn day after day, year after year, the same grass where, centuries ago, Khoi herders let their cattle graze. This is dense, multi-layered memory work, culminating in an object that was as poetic as it was heartbreaking.
Sara Matthews is another CTCA graduate who is interested in memory work, but she came at the genre from an entirely fresh perspective. Many art students are understandably inspired by the personal histories with which they are beginning to reckon, which results in endless variations on the family archive. This year, I counted no less than seven exhibitions across the four art schools predicated on this very theme. Matthews, on the other hand, took as her muse somebody’s grandmother, but not her own. About her Frida series, Matthews wrote, “To some, the muse is a mirror; to others, a compass, perhaps a key, a co-pilot, a lantern, or a seed. Frida is an elderly woman I first saw from the window of a friend’s apartment. She has been my muse for the past few months… Our relationship began with a letter I taped to her door: a humble invitation to have dinner together… She drew me into her world as a witness, and I thus became another vehicle through which her presence, stories, and idiosyncrasies could be transmitted.” This transmission manifested in various ways. On one occasion, Matthews went to Frida’s favourite restaurant, Wimpy, asked the waiters one of Frida’s favourite questions, “Do you think your life is set out for you?” and recorded the responses. I could go on and on about the other wonderful manifestations of this project and Matthews’ work in general, but suffice to say––what struck me about this artist was her willingness to have the bubble of herself exploded by the whims and oddities of other people. I know plenty of successful artists who don’t have half the guts.
While Matthews’ work was, in my view, heartfelt and, therefore, deeply serious, I recognise that, for the average viewer, it nevertheless spoke in the tone of irreverence that has come to influence this generation of our city’s artists. In 2023, Ben Albertyn pointed out in his review of Fullhouse that the dialectic seemed to have definitively turned away from FMF-era political rigour towards “curatorial irreverence,” a “free play of forms” and “unbound ingenuity.” Reflecting on the fact that, when Rhodes fell ten years ago (?!?!), the majority of today’s art school students were eleven years old (!!!), it made sense to me that the irreverent spirit had firmly taken hold amongst this year’s graduates. Take Matt Watt as an example. One of four Michaelis students who run Demo Projects — a slapdash gallery space with tongue-in-cheek programming that took over Under’s Roeland Street space earlier this year — Watt presented for his grad show what can only be described as a mancave, complete with all the trappings of Americana (a mounted bass, a dartboard, a porno mag). To top it off, he gave out free cans of Castle. Leah Mascher, aka Lux, is another Demo alum. Her Marina Abramović-inspired Necklace, which took place at Demo in June, saw the performer invite the public to give her a dozen or so hickeys across her neck. This piece formed the foundation of FOREVER LOVE, a kitschy, campy, televangelist-coded shrine to desire that was, by and large, my favourite of all the Michaelis students’ presentations, and not just because I’m a corny Catholic girl. I was also blown away by Yolanda Li’s Blue sky Green grass, which used, reused, and reproduced the Bliss photograph made famous by the Y2K-era Microsoft screensaver in a series of video works. Li flew a Bliss flag, squatted inside a Bliss tent, played with a Bliss diorama and ate a cake that was frosted with… you guessed it… Irreverent, indeed!
The spirit of irreverence was not merely a Michaelis phenomenon. Over at Stellies, Eduard van Wyk made a tapestry out of the aluminium from energy drink cans in what I can only hope was a wink and a nod at El Anatsui, and Seth Flaum fashioned sculptures out of marrow bones and water book orders, presumably sourced from a restaurant job. At Ruth Prowse, one student, Lisa Williams, made an entire body of work about McDonald’s french fries and even went so far as to display a plate of them blackening with rot on a plinth. These, weirdly enough, paired beautifully alongside more delicate pieces. I’m thinking of Bianca Süssmann’s mother-of-pearl steel sculpture and Ron Sauerman’s portraits hung from bookbinding thread (Stellenbosch) as well as Andisiwe Mgwinteni’s reed grass installation and Samukelisiwe Majola’s woven textiles (Ruth Prowse). The kids, we might say, are alright.
Then again, when I ran into my friend Erin at a grad show event, she said that the kids were not alright, but in a good way. They were “fabulously unwell.” They had gone through the depressive slump, she said, and were riding the upward swing of manic artmaking. For a cohort of third and fourth years who, you will recall, began their art school studies in the midst of a pandemic, this observation did not seem like an exaggeration to me. I don’t want to make a judgment call that will collapse the nuanced, thoughtful, surprising work I saw this grad show season, but I will say this. These kids have learnt the lesson that some artists spend their whole lives skirting: you have to make something. Even in the face of despair, desperation, despondency, depression, you have to make something. And here’s the trick, the final piece of the puzzle––you won’t get a degree out of it, but I’ll tell you for free––that something can be, well… anything!