Supporting video art, MOMO has brought together local and international talent in this showcase of the video medium, writes Danny Shorkend in this review.
The theme that holds the exhibition together is notions of strangeness and/or alienation in a variety of different political, institutional and social contexts. The result is a creative display of various visual imagining techniques, and a possible extraction of meaning insofar as a narrative usually emerges as one engages with the video works.
The two works that I found most captivating is Andrew Thomas Huang’s ‘Interstice’ and Rashaad Newsome’s ‘Shade Performance’.
In the former case, the artist has incorporated a number of dance styles, such as Chinese lion dancing, New York flax dancing and Eastern Orthodox church rituals which give one a sense of the overlap and inter-dependence of cultures or at lest a satisfying multi-cultural, multi disciplinary exploration. In the latter case, Newsome choreographs an odd musical piece, at once a disinterested hum of sound and indifferent singers, and simultaneously a mesmerising music video.
To develop such an account more fully, one notes that ‘Interstice’ creates an ambiance where red overwhelms the “picture plane”, where one then two dancers and the resulting gestures suddenly join a single dancer remind one of a Hindu god worshipping and calling the onlooker forth. The dance is beautifully orchestrated as the red cloth morphs and weaves patterns, as the body becomes a vehicle for the creation of otherworldly creatures and there is an intriguing juxtaposition of religious iconography and a sense of the implausibility of any rigid categorisation. This would imply that while cultural differences ought to be celebrated and communicated, there is also a recognition of a common human template – that which moves us to represent, express, make music, dance and so on and so forth in the first place.
Huang’s work is powerful visually and almost hieratic, the iron fist of institutional laws, of fixation to rules, of a method of worshiping and yet at the same time it engenders a shift in the rules of the game. In fact, the creation of a new game as different contexts combine in an original dance, a kaleidoscope of differences coming together, optically forming a harmony that one can call unified. In the process, individual dancers, a clear context and its specific use remain secondary to a kind of amorphous, rapturous and ecstatic arrangement of dance steps as the red cloth appears to be an organic substance, not simply covering the dancers bodies, but oozing in and out and around the co-ordinated series of motion amidst appropriate musical arrangements.
Newsome’s work, involving sounds associated with so-called black female vernacular is such that while paradoxically the sounds appear not to be an attempt at making music, curiously the sounds do evoke a musical quality. This apparent contradiction belies a deeper sentiment: that the way people are controlled is through language and its powerful grip. By reinventing what counts as music, the performers – and the artist – refuse to be dictated by the conventional use and appropriation of language. The fact that such a language comes together as a musical piece therefore bodes well for the potential of art to negotiate or renegotiate the boundary between art and not art and in the process, a blurred boundary is forged. And it is precisely in that blurring that language is no longer categorical and divisive, but as the sounds indicate, a primal language underlying all languages, a Chomsky like universal grammar. More significantly, language itself is the basis for music, for rhythmic movement. The performers do not then engage with that musical play and in their not dancing and their apathetic facial expressions deny language the power to invest the communicator and recipient with the drive to slavishly build, sing a song or initiate a particular action according to the will of the one who is said to use language.
All in all, the would-be gallery-goer may be pleasantly surprised at the range with which the medium of video can convey meaning and alluring aesthetic devices.
While its obvious focus on little and local narratives, rather than attempt at an objective, generalised history, is obviously subjective, there is sufficient engagement with various social issues that has relevance beyond any particular context. At the same time, it is the particular that is the contested region for the universal or rather while truth is elusive, there can yet be truths.
WHERE & WHEN: MOMO Gallery 170 Buitengracht St, Cape Town, 8001 until 30 July
