kagablog

Review: THE SHOOTING GALLERY
By Robyn Sassen
Cue guest writer

Fake blood, coins up the arse, washing-up liquid as a lubricant to the backdrop of all kinds of images of gratuitous violence from contemporary media…come on! Aryan Kaganof and Catherine Henegan’s The Shooting Gallery is in danger of being a dull has-been rather than the shockingly outrageous postmodern gesture it bills itself as.

Performance art slipped onto the scene at the time of the two World Wars. The world had become an ugly, hostile place and artists wanted to challenge society. They moved away from traditional approaches to art and began to use their own bodies to create work. So nudity, bodily acts and even blood-letting became a means for artists to radically engage their audience, challenging them (and, by default, broader society) to rethink how they related to the world.

The Shooting Gallery is a collaborative effort between Henegan and Kaganof, and represents Henegan’s debut as a director, and an attempt at melding values between performed and art-based gesture.
But while it is all very well to issue a press release saying the piece is based on the Bang Bang Club and the type of photography they did during the politically turbulent 1990s, and all very well to title the piece with a pun on heroin- and photographer- culture, it is another thing to show convincing evidence of this in the work.
Poorly strung together, the work does not speak convincingly for itself. Watching it, I kept thinking of other local artists in this discipline: Steven Cohen, Tracey Rose, Berni Searle, Churchill Madikida all use their bodies and autobiographical presences in a meticulously thought manner. Their work challenges taboo, but it is the unexpected sense of the poetic in it that makes it art.

Coming away from Shooting Gallery, I was left cold. I was not traumatised nor discomforted by the piece. Rather, I was bored.

Its humour is trite, the sequence of image and gesture not well pinned together. A ham-handed attempt to bludgeon stereotypes with more stereotypes, the piece is an attempted assault on the physical senses of the audience, which fails. It exploits media imagery and even offers a silly, self-deprecating insight into how the press might receive it.

That said, two inspired sequences are not destroyed by the dearth of critical shaping: a moment when Kaganof plays a vuvuzela in tandem with the movements of a vulture projectedc on-screen; another where a naked Kaganof is suspended upside down by a chain from the ceiling. He assumes the position of an inverted crucifix, and as his body is lowered, he scatters silver coins across the stage.

The Shooting Gallery is a sponsored event on the main programme. it opened yesterday to enthusiastic audience attendance. that’s good. Festivalgoers need exposure to this kind of material, if only to stretch their horizons.