Pre-requisites to the Human Chain
It’s worth a reminder that advertising has long flirted with the aesthetics of collective activism, stirring our inner insecurities and hopes for a better future with the purchase of a perfect ice cold beverage. While it is easy to lament the mis-steps of Kendall Jenner, no stranger to the exploitation of personal or collective fame, one might do better to examine a history of advertising designed to co-opt and manipulate idealism.
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Widget: Jake Singer’s RGB Sky
This age, our age, the post-post-industrial digitised age, now possesses its own timeline and geology – The Anthropocene – which defines an earth and a civilisation governed by human impact. It is this man-made morph which Singer places centre-stage. His combines – which includes rocks – reveal the new splice of Man and machine, geology and polymer, which Wired magazine dubbed the ‘Plastiglomerate’.
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Questions of Scale
These proximities and distances are at times difficult to reconcile, bringing into view the incommensurable economies of the image. I own two of Abongile’s drawings; I am not his only collector. I wonder what the work would perform if placed inside one of the exhibition spaces. Would this disrupt the fragile economy in which it already exists?
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Barend de Wet
After pulling up my handbrake, I asked De Wet about his fascination with colour. Why? What is its yield? He looked at me through his Gene Hackman glasses. It is the material in its truest form, he said, passenger door ajar. It is paint as paint, nothing else. It just is. No complications. He slipped out my car, and was gone.
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Art Films: An Introduction
Staid, socially functional, artists are of no use to filmmakers – you’re far more likely to see a Wayne Barker biopic than you might a film about William Kentridge any time soon. Dionysian impulses and antisocial behaviour are what will get your artistic biography the seventh art treatment – audiences want to see you drinking yourself into a stupor at 11am surrounded by empty wine bottles and unpaid rent bills rather than calmly sipping tea in Constantia contemplating your next still life with cosmos.
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The Big Hole: Negative Space at WHATIFTHEWORLD
No land can stand unoccupied. And occupation is at the discretion of those in power. Even if that occupation requires spaces to be forcibly empty; like acres of unused lawn, or the underside of highways, or park benches with polls which prevent people from stretching out. All space is contested.
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Late Stage Capitalism Luxe
The glib, jaded self-reflexivity present in Paulsen’s language is essentially the same as that which might crop up on one’s Instagram feed daily. It is a language that has been developed in the crucible of the internet and social media, with the capability of conveying complex ideas through the film of an assumed shared cultural understanding.
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If You Have Stage Fright, it Never Goes Away
Jared Ginsburg’s Interludes plays with that stuff and the limits it describes. The title of the show holds two meanings in concert, referencing an intermission between acts but also a smaller secondary action taking place during that period. In Ginsburg’s terms, an interlude is a pregnant sort of pause…it’s waiting for something to happen while also holding that something at bay.
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Editorial
This past weekend the South African art world had the tragic news of the untimely passing of Barend de Wet. We first met in 2008 at Studio 2666 in Commercial Street, just behind parliament in Cape Town. Barefoot and dressed in a skimpy bathrobe, he was demonstrating his mad yo-yo skills. He was very good – a world champion.
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The Human Gesture
This does not stop me from longing to stare into the abyss, as Dante did and “see how all the pages of the Universe are bound by love, into a single volume.” Substance, accident and mode unite, he tells us – a serviceable definition of an artwork, surely, and one that holds out the promise of wholeness, while one gets out the paper and sharpens the pencils, and wait.
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