September 18, 2014
I love the cartoon above from a recent New Yorker. It so beautifully skewers the pretension inherent in the way some artists (and critics) write about their work. And I specially love the way this dog is stretching his little paws to emphasize the difficult physicality of his practice.
Talking about the difficult physicality of practice – one of the most brilliant performances I have ever seen was Un-Mute on the opening night of the recent Live Art Festival in Cape Town. This was the second manifestation of GIPCA’s Live Art Festival, ten days of performance art, and like the first, was directed by the indefatigable Jay Pather.
Andile Vellem is a choreographer and dancer who is deaf, and communicates to his fellow dancers by signing. in Un-Mute he worked with Themba Mbuli and two dancers whose disability requires they move around in wheelchairs: Nadine Mckenzie and Zama Sonjica. The interaction between the performers and the wheelchairs was a masterpiece of drama and fierce timing.
The wheelchairs themselves were driven with such skill by Mackenzie and Sonjica, that they seemed alive, wheeling, spinning, charging across the stage as their owners were lifted or flung out of the chairs by the other two dancers. One might imagine that owning a pair of functioning legs was an essential for a dancer. Not in this case.
Over at the Goodman, in his exhibition, ‘Show and Tell’, Mikhael Subotzky was also concerned with the limitations of the senses and how that limitation might be transcended As a photographer, Subotzky’s interest is in our sense of vision, and in the difference between the images which imprint themselves on the retina and how we actually perceive them – a perception governed not only by reality but by the conditioning of a whole slew of social factors.
Most of us remember those once popular stereograms that at first appeared to be an impenetrable overall pattern, but if you squinted slightly and stared hard, the pattern would miraculously reassemble itself into a flat background and a foreground object. In the largest work on his show, Sibidia Autosterogram, Subotzky produces a wall sized version of this, projecting a jiggling pattern of brilliantly coloured pixels whose rapid movements make it even more difficult to penetrate the flat surface to the action behind.
It may seem quite a leap to go from Subotzky’s esoteric experimentations to Michael Taylor’s playful figurative paintings on his Whatiftheworld show, ‘I was born yesterday,’ but there is something about the way Taylor abstracts his foregrounds so that the main part of the image is pretty much all on the same plane – a seemingly spontaneous but very skilful handling of pattern and space - which somehow reminds me of Subotzky’s Sibidia Autostereogram.
And to sign off this monthly round up, a couple of pictures of South African artists taking part in the annual Paul Klee Zentrum Sommerakademie in Bern. One of last year’s fellows, Lerato Shadi, flew in from Berlin, and is seen here with London dancer Andrew Kerton.
And here, outside the historic Bern Kunsthalle is this year’s fellow Igshaan Adams, with Kaya Bekhalam and Federica Bueti.
