Danny Shorkend reviews this group exhibition, New Revolutions, at the Goodman Gallery until 6th July.
As one enters the gallery on opening night a person covered in a blanket blocks the entrance. This performance, if you will is recorded on a video that is shown on a television that is placed on the floor at the entrance. It’s an act that questions the seeming schism between life and art: is this an indication that art pays no attention to vagrants, to the ostracised of society, the have-nots?
It is an enigmatic performance by Gabrielle Goliath and perhaps also questions the elitist nature of art, as the gallery-goer steps over, avoids and disregards the lying figure. Then one makes ones way through the gallery, a litany of important artists, each fetching exorbitant prices. Art and life clearly a game such that art is perhaps impotent to transform the real issues, such as poverty alleviation and the necessary compassion to initiate such transformations.
But this is “New Revolutions”, and there is – contradictorily so – an attempt to question and reorientate our common grasp of reality.
Another video work by Minnette Vari is a strong visual piece with eerie music that defies an easy reading. Forms never quite settle, colours are neon-like and space leads the eye into great depth, while surface features change just as one begins to grasp at something. It is unclear what the meaning is, as if one merely enjoys the experience itself, never quite knowing why.
I then resign myself to the fact that there is no certainty as to definite cognitive content as there is no clear overarching thematic thread. Rather there are isolated works on view, each with a seeming historical and political agenda, and yet stylistically each artist works in their own way.
There are a number of works that stand out:
Cecil Skotnes’s signature style always evokes a powerful emotive response. Worked into wood, the reddish-brown seeps through; the figures contain an energy that few are able to conjure with traditional media. One such figure refers to the strong leader, Shaka, a work from 1973 that has universal overtones. It is to the late artists’ credit that he was able to create works of art that resonate with basic human drives as well as intellectual pattern and ordering through a unique language. Equally compelling is Robert Hodgins “Sunset Jocks” of 1988 (see photo). Here the figures are ridiculed in their superficiality, in their raw animal intent, while one gets the sense that their running asserts their apparent manhood.
Perhaps Diane Victor’s “shadow boxer”, a work in charcoal and dust on paper, sums up my impressions of the works on view and in particular the notion of “New Revolutions”. For insofar as boxing is a metaphor for surmounting difficulties and obstacles; fighting politically; the process of nature progressing through the survival of the fittest and creating an arena in which to struggle and play against and with one another in order to reach ones potential – so one may surmise that art is itself a game toward achieving human excellence or does it hide the actual struggle that needs to occur if things are to be improved in life proper? In this sense the “sleeping” figure at the entrance at the opening or in its recording, is that much more poignant.
Yet I move and dodge and weave in trying to understand the intent of the exhibition and feel felled by the variety on offer. How does one, for example connect Oltmann’s “infant” in aluminium wire and the various kinds of painterly or sculptural works on view? What and whose revolution is at work? Has not the playing fields of the revolution changed in 50 years? Has art developed a means to engage with that change, perhaps even initiate it or is art a world unto itself that has no real bearing on “on the ground” realities?
While these questions filtered through, I enjoyed the painterly expression of Misheck Masamvu’s “flame lily” as well as Willem Boshoff’s “garden of words” sculptural piece to name a few.
The Goodman Gallery serves as an important bastion of South African art over the last few decades and while I cannot find a clear evolution and trajectory linking the decades, perhaps then it is more apt to recall an “revolutionary spirit”, which unlike the connotations of “evolution” inspire an intelligence, a design of sorts behind the changing forms and hues of art, of life.
I recommend a visit and certainly there will be an attraction to the great variety and its concomitant meaning.
The review by Danny Shorkend first appeared in the Cape Times
WHERE: Goodman Gallery. 3rd Floor Fairweather House 176 Sir Lowry Rd, Woodstock, Cape Town 7925
PHOTO: Robert Hodgins
