Chapter 11 - Acting Out: The Installation and Performance Artists

TRACEY ROSE The Wailers 2004
Still from a single-channel video
19 minutes
Courtesy of the artist and The Project, New York
© Tracey Rose

In an interview in the New York Times (June 15, 2008) painter Marlene Dumas told journalist Deborah Solomon her childhood memory of the country’s most important art museum, the South African National Gallery, as it was then called. Dumas described it as “a very dead place in Cape Town that showed old colonial paintings of bridges in the landscape.”

Since the 1990s, however, South African art institutions have been radically affected by the new democracy. Museums have had to shake off the image of staid institutions serving an elitist white audience. And, like other museums around the world, they have also had to acquire equipment for new media, installation, and performance, often with very limited budgets.

In each of the three major urban centers, artist-based organizations have stepped in to attempt to broaden the audience for the art museums. The Johannesburg Art Gallery is one example. Situated in Joubert Park, near the main railway station, it is surrounded by overcrowded apartment blocks and busy streets. The park itself serves as a center for black church groups holding prayer services and a meeting place for lovers and families, but it is also known for its pickpockets and bag snatchers. There are two main entrances to the museum, but in the name of security the entrance into the museum from the park is often kept locked. Apart from the park photographers who make their living photographing visitors to the park and sometimes bring their clients into the museum atrium to be photographed against a sculpture, the park and the museum exist as two separate worlds.

In a wide-ranging initiative to try to bridge the gap between the communities living in the park area and the art world, in 2000 the Joubert Park Project came into being, coordinated by artist Dorothee Kreutzfeldt and art logistics organizer Bié Venter. Three months of inner city workshops were followed up by an extended series of public art events both in the park and the gallery itself, involving dozens of local artists such as Steven Cohen and Robin Rhode, as well as invited international artists. Photographer Terry Kurgan designed and produced a portable photo studio for the park photographers, with internal walls showing different backdrops for the photographers to offer to their clients. The Joubert Park Project has continued to plan events involving collaborations between artists and the community, and is now permanently housed in the renovated Drill Hall in downtown Johannesburg.

Durban was the first city to widen the parameters of an art museum. In 1998 a support group of artists launched the Red Eye initiative at the Durban Art Gallery. Red Eye was an art party that took place the first Friday night of every month, and included dance and fashion in the mix. Lines of young people—black and white—many of whom had never before been to an art gallery, stretched around the block.

And in Cape Town Andrew Putter, one of the founding members of artists’ organization Public Eye, worked with Public Eye and the South African National Gallery to create Softserve in 1999, a one-night event in which the main gallery space was given over to the work of young artists who normally would never have received museum space. Videos and performances were on the agenda. Guests danced wildly in the atrium and in the deejay room there was a live video link to New York, where crowds gathered simultaneously at another art space. As in the other cities, many in attendance had never visited a museum before. Follow-up events in ensuing years were equally successful.

The nature of these events, along with the exposure to international artists brought by the Johannesburg Biennales of 1995 and 1997, helped to gain a wider public and institutional acceptance of the mixed-media approach many artists were beginning to take anyway—incorporating video, installation, and performance in their works.

Performance took many forms. In January 1998 Kendell Geers intervened with the centenary celebrations of Fort Klapperkop, a right-wing military museum situated just outside Pretoria. He announced publicly that on Fort Klapperkop’s centenary day he would lock himself into the building in the name of art. All of the other activities planned by the various Afrikaner groups to mark the centenary, like raising the flag and a prayer service, he said, would become part of his artwork. Titled Guilty, Geers describes it as “a site-specific work that explores the mechanisms and depths of guilt.” On the day Steven Cohen, in black dress and blond wig, arrived at Fort Klapperkop to support Geers’s action and was roughly escorted off the scene by burly security guards, but Geers, always the provocateur, was nowhere to be seen.

Today mid-career artists like Minnette Vári and Berni Searle create affecting and memorable performances in video to address the errors and omissions of history and nationalism, and Kay Hassan examines the pathology of the city in Urbanation, Hassan’s mid-career retrospective of installations and mixed media work at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2008. Tracey Rose confronts the politics of sex, race, and gender in filmed performances that center on her vivid subjective responses to situations.

Dineo Seshee Bopape seeks personal and multicultural narratives that shift the focus beyond her identity of “black woman artist.” Now living in Berlin, “cultural pirate” Candice Breitz creates astringent and minimal syntheses of Hollywood movies and other pop culture references such as karaoke.

Ralph Borland invents an interactive safety suit to wear in mass protest situations, and Kathryn Smith creates visually arresting gallery installations around the theme of forensic investigations of old crimes. Ruth Sacks hires a pilot to write her message in the sky or uses powerful searchlights to replicate the illegal immigrant experience. Investigating the idea that the structure of the art world has superseded the art object itself, Ed Young tries his best to do nothing, and his studiomates Douglas Gimberg and Christian Nerf stage a rogue boat ride with political implications. James Webb uses sound recordings as key elements in his installations, and Anthea Moys investigates whether accidents and play can set you free. All of these artists share a sense of spectacle and use it to provoke viewers’ thoughts on current events, history, and art history alike.

TRACEY ROSE
Lucie’s Fur Version 1:1:1-The Messenger 2004
Lambda print
80 x 60 cm
Image courtesy of the artist and the Project, New York
© Tracey Rose