Anton Karstel

Current Review(s)

The Repeated Flagging of a Symbol

Anton Karstel’s ‘Youth Day’, currently showing at SMAC Cape Town, is an exercise in pigheaded painterly persistence that is at once bewildering and intriguing. Based on 58 seconds of footage shot by his father in 1966, the 120-plus paintings form a ‘film-strip’ that wrap around the gallery, each artwork almost identical to the next. The film itself plays in one corner, with all the strange artefacts, stutters and colour blooms of old footage transferred from an analogue to digital medium. It depicts a Republic Day celebration - an important public holiday within the apartheid state. In the background a group of white-clad youths perform synchronized exercises. And although the resolution of the film doesn’t allow for a close examination, what pervades the scene is the form of a kitsch national-socialist ideal. Their unity of movement and matching outfits suggest a robotic or eugenic world of harmonious supremacy. In the foreground of this display, centered in the middle of the screen, is a flapping symbol of this unity: the old national flag.

This flag, cropped in and blown up, becomes the subject of Karstel’s paintings. Each painting, rendered in muted tones, is a single frame from the film, which at a distance (an elevation hard to achieve in the smaller Cape Town SMAC), merges into a frozen animation; a frame-by-frame replay of each lashing flap of the flag. This symbol of nationalism and apartheid is what Karstel slows down, breaks up into constituent parts, and literally and obsessively analyses. This fine splitting is evocative of the infamous Abraham Zapruder film, purportedly the most analysed clip in film history, which captured the Kennedy assassination. Karstel acts much like the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination, and the countless conspiracy buffs to split the film into its constituent parts, each frame measured, zoomed and timed. The idea is that through this shattering into pieces one will somehow get to see the truth and break through the impenetrable surface of the image.

However, through the breaking down of the illusion of continuous motion, the frame-by-frame examination removes information. You can measure and quantify individual frames, but the absent time between the frames is apparent. Magnification is also useless. Images are mute and bound by their resolution: the more you analyse beyond this bounding box the more abstract they become. The image refuses to resolve itself. Noise and artefacts become significant in themselves. Pixels and grain no longer delineate form, they become forms. The illusion of filmic unity stutters, blurs and

28 June 2012 - 11 July 2012

Listings(s)

'Youth Day'

In Youth Day, Anton Karstel works from archival film footage taken by his father during a gymnastics display held at Loftus Versveld in Pretoria on May 30, 1966 as part of the Republic Day Festivals. Karstel painted stills from a fifty-eight second strip of 8mm Kodak film. From the vantage point of his father’s camera, the old South African flag dominates the foreground. Behind the flag, choreographed youth perform various acrobatic exercises designed to display the ideology of Volksgesondheid.

Rendered over a hundred and twenty times in oil on canvas, the image of the flag shifts further away from its origin in time and in format. Working from a poor quality digital version of the original film footage, and re-photographing frames of the flag, Karstel proceeds to paint the subsequently corroded images of effected quality-loss and “digital distortion”. Here, Karstel is interested in the imperfections and pixelations that occur in the re-recording of these stills. In this installation, Karstel formulates a personal dialogue between video and painting. The fleeting fifty-eight seconds, captured by his father, is reworked and reclaimed by Karstel’s hand in an excess of paintings produced over almost a year. For the artist, there is an acknowledgment of this production as “excessively unnecessary”, a labour-intensive replication of “mass repetition” as if in an infinite drawing out of meaning and information.

28 June 2012 - 11 July 2012

'Property, Faith & Beauty and Other Recent Paintings'

Anton Karstel’s 'Property, Faith & Beauty and Other Recent Paintings' opens at SMAC Stellenbosch.

30 October 2014 - 07 December 2014