kagablog

By Mary Corrigall

At the Frieze Art Fair in London in 2007, devotees queued up to have artists Jake and Dinos Chapman defile the royal insignia on their pound notes.

Adding to the buzz was Rob Pruitt, an artist who turned a gallery booth into a flea market, where he flogged disused objects donated by other artists.

A life-size copy of a 1970 Dodge Challenger made by Richard Prince dominated another booth and a performer dressed as a bobby entertained passersby with his yoga moves. But the most notable moment was when Kris Martin affected his intangible artwork, dubbed One Minute Silence (2007), which demanded that everyone in the fair remain quiet for one minute.

Call them art fair gimmicks if you must, but all of these staged interventions at this art fair not only created a frisson of excitement, but reiterated the fact that artists cannot be contained within the confines of a strictly commercial art event. Nor can their subversive compulsions be tamed; they will automatically disrupt and challenge convention at every turn.

At this year’s Joburg Art Fair, however, there were few such memorable attractions or interventions. Marcus Neustetter’s Work in Progress (2009) was perhaps the only artwork that defied the art fair setting. Consisting of coloured building blocks stacked up to the ceiling, it protruded from the confines of the white display, physically and conceptually challenging the boundaries that define such an event. As a temporary object, Neustetter’s artwork couldn’t be sold or transported, thereby defying the objective to create sellable or easily packaged art.

Even Jane Alexander’s installation, Security (2006), with its barbed wire borders that hemmed in a rectangle of artificial grass, seemed to conform to the controlled spatial dynamics of the art fair. Nevertheless it was originally commissioned for the 27th Sao Paulo Biennale, but perhaps its neat boxlike configuration appealed to the organisers.

At least last year art world tricksters Avant Car Guard created a stir with their performance piece at the Whatiftheworld booth, with their tongue-in-cheek memorial marking the “death” of Kendell Geers.

The absence of such performance interventions at this year’s fair ensured that it was nothing more than an exercise in heightened commercial activity. Avant Car Guard’s The Invoice (2009), a make-believe receipt painted on to canvas, made a wry comment on the commodification of art. But otherwise there were few works that threatened or questioned the conventions of such an exposition.

The fair did, however, provide an opportunity to identify what is considered sellable. Photographic works were in abundance and there was a palatable sense that artists working with this medium were searching for ways to stand out from the crowd. From superimposing existing dated cut-outs on to contemporary photographs to sealing each part of a photograph in a see-through plastic container to photographing aged women draped in clothing made from animal entrails, they were trying out all manner of visual tricks to get attention. But mostly their efforts felt contrived and superfluous to their expression.

Berry Brickle’s Melancholia 01 (2007) from the Encounters of Bamako collection stood out: a synthesis of collage and photography that saw a variety of found images and photographs layered over each other to create an otherworldly image that played with its temporality - no mean feat considering that photography is inextricably tied to reality.

The documentary style genre, which was fairly well represented at the fair, just couldn’t compete in the face more progressive forms of art. Photographers should take Zander Blom’s lead in his Travels of Bad series, displayed at the Rooke gallery stand. Blom exploits the documentary function of photography while simultaneously allowing it to serve a so-called high art function too.

With so much art on view it was hard for individual pieces to shine. It often was the more three-dimensional sculptural pieces that tended to steal attention, such as Mary Sibande’s A Conversation with Madam CJ Walker (2008), on show at Gallery Momo’s stand. It featured two mannequins of domestic workers in their “maid attire”, which appeared more like a period costume, suggesting that their task/role belonged to another era.

Though the title may have inferred they were engaging in a dialogue with a white woman, the conversation that Sibande refers to is one with the first black American millionaire, summoning a more metaphorical dialogue that encompasses issues pertaining to servitude and the aspiration for wealth and power. One can only guess what the Sandton madams visiting the fair would have made of the artwork.

Wayne Barker’s Desire and Golden Girl, showing at SMAC’s booth, were also eye-catching. He has ditched the neon lights (at last!) and progressed to produce wonderful, kitschy-art-slash-crafty-slash-pop-artish beadworks that appear like a stereotypical advert parading obvious markers of sex and wealth. They were beautifully crafted, witty and relevant.

Most gallery stands showed artworks in isolation from the bodies to which they belonged - except for Blom’s Travels of Bad series. And the arbitrary arrangements of the art ensured that most of the works were shown out of context which silenced their subtext.

But art fairs are about generating sales and, as such, most gallerists were keen to hedge their bets by displaying a full array of art in the hope that they would have more of a chance of nailing a sale. In such a context, the aesthetic or transcendental nature of art objects is stifled.

And with hoards of people jostling for a view and a glut of art distracting one’s attention, there is scant room for the viewer to meditate on each piece. In other words art fairs do not make ideal environments for viewing or appraising art. Nor are they, as Ross Douglas, the organiser of the art fair, proposes, opportunities for the South African public “to be educated about contemporary art”.

The BMW Art Talks at the fair did provide occasions for the public to learn more about art production in this country, but the catalogue, a thick book that almost exclusively contained images, ensured there wasn’t reading material that visitors could take home that might have provided some sort of introduction to the central issues.

The introduction of a design stand - staged by Southern Guild - might also distort the public’s understanding and appreciation of art. While the boundaries between art and design are blurred, there is a distinction; it might not necessarily manifest in the final product, but exists in terms of the creator’s intentions and motives.

If the art fair is to achieve its objective in terms of “growing a new audience” for art, then it seems paramount that a novice audience is able to grasp the difference between a slick chair and an artwork. However, it is more than likely that succeeding Joburg Art Fairs might include more design stands.

It is not because designers don’t have a platform - they do; there is a surplus of interior décor and design expos. The problem is the limited number of bona fide contemporary art galleries - most of those little shops in malls peddling trite landscape art don’t count.So in order for Artlogic, Douglas’s company, to grow the fair each year they will be forced to embrace more and more object displays derived from that fuzzy territory that delineates the overlap between art and craft.

No doubt Artlogic will find expedient ways of dressing up this art event as something more substantial than a commercial venture as they have done to-date with public assertions that their event is a more viable endeavour than the Johannesburg Biennale’s or Cape Africa Platform’s art initiatives in Cape Town. The Joburg Biennale might have ceased and Cape Africa Platform may have faced an upward struggle in staging their event but these are exhibitions and not commercial art expositions. There is huge difference in terms of their approach to display and the discourses they engage with and create. Douglas may believe that he is offering an alternative to such events but in no way does or can a primarily commercially driven art initiative be able to compete or achieve the same objectives as a biennale.

These Joburg Art Fairs only provide a temporary diversion and will no doubt cease to be of any interest once the makeshift galleries inside the Sandton Convention are pulled-down to make way for the next exposition.

(first published in Sunday Independent April 12)