The Politics of the Penis

Thabiso Pule and Hector Thami Manekehla perform Penis Politics

WE can't look directly at them, but we can't look away either. Thabiso Pule and Hector Thami Manekehla are metres away from the front row and are swinging their naked penises from side to side. It's the only part of their bodies on display; they're kitted out in black suits and are wearing black balaclavas, which add a threatening edge. They're like this male menace confronting, inflicting and boasting about their core masculinity, waving it in our faces, though through their exaggerated swagger of the male gait, they are similarly parodying the way men embody power.

They move sharp and tightly like action heroes, forcing their waving penises to slap across their thighs. We giggle nervously and shuffle along the floor of the small room in the Cape Town City Hall that has temporarily been taken over by the Live Art Festival.

Someone dubbed Pule and Manekehla's production Penis Politics, as a masculine rendition of the Vagina Monologues, though predictably in male fashion it doesn't include talking and sharing. This is a non-verbal performance and up for scrutiny are limp genitals. So, it isn't about celebrating masculine prowess but questioning its shaky foundations and the penis itself as the defining characteristic of male identity - or black male identity.

This isn't our first glimpse of male nudity at the Live Art Festival; a few nights earlier, we entered a makeshift theatre to find Tebogo Munyai balanced on his head wearing little other than a lit candle in his rear. It's an unforgettable scene and the liberal artsy crowd who fill the room are almost stunned into silence: his body is magnificent, ideal. We're also unaccustomed to seeing the male body on display, it appearing as a vessel. The piece is called Qina ke Qawe, and the only part of his body that is beyond our prying gaze is his penis, wrapped in white bandages. It's as if it has been injured. The effort to conceal it only serves to emphasise its presence and the politics attached to that.

Themba Mbuli's Dark Cell is a dance work revisiting the indignities the black male body was subjected to during the apartheid era; he dances in front of Ernest Cole's seminal photograph, Mine Recruitment, which shows a row of naked men lining up to be inspected. His performance ends with him in the buff. It appears as if he is trying to reclaim the naked black body from the past.

Male nudity and displays of the penis aren't confined to this event. The limp penises belonging to Ed Young's hyperreal self-portrait My Gallerist made me do it and the middle-aged white men posing in Pieter Hugo's series of unforgiving portraits for the Pirelli Special Project, were talking points at last year's Joburg Art Fair. Male nudity carries weight; it is a taboo across cultures. This is perhaps why performance artists like Steven Cohen have made their naked bodies part of their performative language - it pushes buttons.

The tone of Pule and Manekehla's piece is also confrontational and transgressive. In the wake of the Brett Murray/The Spear debacle, their work and gestures could superficially be read as a response to the president's vehement rejection of a stylised self-portrait in which his member was unveiled. The official line the government took at the time implied this action was disrespectful and (ironically) an affront to his masculine pride and dignity.

Art of Abstraction: Rhodes and Hlobo

A still from Robin Rhodes A Day in May

It’s a pleasing surprise. The so-called “eye” of Nicholas Hlobo’s winding rubber sculpture Tyaphaka greets you on the stairs before the entrance to the Stevenson’s Braamfontein gallery, creating this sense that the work cannot be contained. It’s like an amorphous beast, an alien being that keeps multiplying. You half expect to return to the area to find that this black rubber mass has encroached upon Juta Street. This work belongs on the street. It’s exterior fashioned from rubber tyres, incongruently sutured with ribbons, forms this disused blob that would blend into Joburg’s urban landscape. It appears displaced in the pristine white gallery setting, exploding in its largest room, filling the air with the aroma of rubber – a signature of Hlobo’s sculptural work.

The presentation of this rambling sculptural work in this location has lent it new readings. It debuted at the Biennale of Sydney in 2011 before featuring at the Stevenson’s Cape Town gallery in Woodstock in the group show titled Fiction as Fiction (or A Ninth Johannesburg Biennale), where I first encountered it. In that setting, it was buried inside the gallery and the “eye” was on a plinth, thus giving it significance. I was fixated with its relationship to the body; the large mass was like intestines, human entrails. In the Braamfontein setting, it seems detached from any corporeal or real object. It’s a complete abstraction, that invites all manner of metaphors to become attached to it.

Uthwalisiwe by Hlobo

Hlobo’s work probably hasn’t been connected to the body for some time; he stopped doing performance works and evoking the body through both his sculptural works and the motifs sewn on to pristine white canvases, that read like the skin what with inner cavities and external protrusions. Such works evoked the the friction between the exterior and interior – identity politics. Abstraction and formalism are the new buzz words in South African art and they seem to have relieved artists of this initial post-apartheid  preoccupation.
This has given way to a focus on production, the medium, taking it to its logical conclusion. Hlobo’s “beached whale” of a rubber sculpture is in some ways just an extreme, excessive conclusion of what he was doing when he was still interested in the cultural hybridity of the South African identity – part Xhosa, part English etc – and the relationship between tradition and contemporary notions of masculinity.

There is no narrative or political logic driving the work in this exhibition – not in any obvious way at least. This doesn’t read as a glaring absence, perhaps because the work superficially appears to extend from his identity-laden work – it’s the rubber-ribbon vocabulary that secures this idea. And in truth as his work is born from cultural and linguistic faultlines, ambiguity has always been its defining feature. Of course, now it may be lost in its own ambiguity.

Rural Art Party: Winter Sculpture Fair

Serge Nitgeka's  Father and Son
pic by Mary Corrigall

It's a luxury car pile-up. Something you might expect in a private school parking lot - not in the idyllic country setting of the Cradle of Humankind. Designer 4x4s built for city living line Kromdraai Road leading to Nirox Foundation and its sculpture park. It's optimistic to think that Joburg's well-heeled are flocking to see art in this rambling rural park, in particular a contemporary sculpture exhibition dubbed After the Rainbow that is part of the inaugural Winter Sculpture Fair.

It's more likely the promise of a day out with top nosh and wine from Franschhoek has caused this absurd rural traffic jam. Joburgers might covet T-shirts boasting their city's skyline but they jump at a chance to see it in their rear-view mirror. Especially if the outing entails a consumerist twist. With flags and signs bearing the MasterCard logo dotted everywhere, the Winter Sculpture Fair's corporate ties are boldly stated. This is not a makeshift rural market fair, not by any stretch. There are no old tannies peddling home-made jam. Nor is there an array of sentimental oil landscapes leaning against trees. Nor is this some sort of DIY hipster organic food market. As you enter the park, you find yourself in a sophisticated stand resplendent with all the creature comforts. There are long elegant suites to lounge on. You can pick up a cappuccino or sample or buy whisky. This isn't roughing it in the countryside.

The manicured lawns of Nirox Park allow Joburgers to be in the bush without actually being in the bush. It's a lush green oasis and the dark brown thorny vegetation that defines the area is kept at a safe distance. The temporary architecture for the fair is uberstylish without being garish. We quaff wine from glasses. There isn't a plastic plate or cup in sight. And the portable loos are hidden from view until you need them.

Good taste might be a negotiable or shifting quality in Joburg, but Artlogic, the organisers, seem to have their handle on what it might constitute and have established themselves as its arbiters. Alternative shopping experiences with a high-art edge seem to be their bag. Headed by Ross Douglas and Cobi Labuschagne, they started with the Joburg Art Fair at the Sandton Convention Centre, added the Food Wine Design experience on the roof of Hyde Park shopping centre, and now are clearly setting out to branch beyond the mall space - they are also looking into a rural cycling lifestyle event.

At lunchtime, long queues protrude from tents. There doesn't seem to be enough posh nosh to go around - on the Saturday there was none left by 2pm and most of the offerings on blackboard menus have been rubbed out. The cuisine and wine hails from Franschhoek - where else? The uber foodie haven Le Quartier Francaise have a stand, but it's hidden behind a hungry crowd. It's a long enough wait for food anywhere and the portions are small and overpriced. This is a bit of a hallmark of Artlogic events; style comes with a price-tag.

As with the Food Wine Design fair, the wine is more accessible, more available than the food. It's a good strategy; people are less discerning about what they buy and how much they spend with a few good glasses under their belt. They probably have a better time, too. Most of the wares - the sculptures - start at R50 000, so they aren't exactly the kind of products you would snap up on a whim, though some of them could only be whimsical wine-fuelled purchases. Like Barend de Wet's Red Rooster and Mellow Yellow, two blob-like structures that seem to incongruously translate daubs of colour into uncompromising steel designs. There are other designer wares for sale; a bit of pottery, some design/art books. Everything is desirable, designer.

Richard Forbes Vortex I is a hit with kids

Dotted around the undulating park are the sculptures, but it takes time to get to them and around them.
Nirox Park might be the ideal location for an outdoor sculpture show, but it's a good picnicking spot, too. And the event presents the middle-class desire for "a good family day out". Some of the children mistake sculptures for elaborate jungle gyms. Richard Forbes's Vortex I, a large red construction of lines configured around a hole, is a huge hit with the kids. There is little parents can do to pry them away from it - they want to enter the "vortex". It's disturbing and amusing that some of the works are seen as playthings, but this is what happens to art when you detach it from the gallery setting; it becomes something else. Certainly, the supposed sacredness attached to it is partly eroded. This has positive and negative spin-offs. It's good children are interacting with art, but it's not so good if they don't know it is art.

Packaging a life: Gerard Sekoto

A self-portrait of Sekoto

It shouldn’t be the case, but of all the images that lingers it is a snapshot of the entrance of a pedestrian Parisian bar. You can’t see much of the interior; a faux wooden bar counter tapers off into a dark abyss. Gerard Sekoto stepped into that void almost daily, during his last days.
“He drank from 12 to 12,” observes Barabara Lindop matter-of-factly as she flashes the photograph in front of me, before flitting across to another glass case where other documents alluding to the complex puzzle that was Sekoto’s life are on display.

It is now under scrutiny again in Song for Sekoto, a centenary – he was born in 1913 – retrospective at the Wits Art Museum (Wam). This particular vision of Sekoto is guided by Lindop, a trustee of the Gerard Sekoto foundation, who has compiled the catalogue and the archival material, and Mary-Jane Darroll who curated the art.

The women may be united in their obsession with Sekoto but for each it is sustained by different perspectives; Lindop is concerned with the details of Sekoto’s life and Darroll the “aesthetics of his work”. The two embody the different points of view from which an artist’s legacy is deconstructed and, in the context of a large show such as this, reconstructed.

The picture of Sekoto that emerges from Song for Sekoto is a familiar one. There are no revelations. What sets this exhibition apart from the 1989 retrospective held at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (Jag) and the 2006 show at the Standard Bank Gallery, which concentrated on the Paris years, is that this is the most comprehensive with more than 200 of his key artworks on show; including some of the Paris works, and a sizeable collection of documents that haven’t been available to the public.

Predictably, the tale of Sekoto’s life that emerges from the documents and artworks has a tragic bite. In a journal article for Presence Africaine in 1957 he details the difficulties of becoming an artist in apartheid South Africa, where he was barred from access to formal art education. The hand-written draft is displayed inside a glass case in the gallery, yet the surrounding artworks from the most prolific or admired periods of his career – the Sophiatown period from 1938 to 1942 and the Eastwood period from 1945 to 1947 – suggest that despite the limitations the state placed on his life and career he flourished and excelled. This may be part of the romance of Sekoto’s oeuvre; though during these periods he documented township life, subtly commenting on living conditions in a ghetto environment, the magnificence of the works themselves transcends the confines of the settings.

In other words the works don’t appear to be products of the places from which they hail. Yet, of course, because the paintings from these destinations are aesthetically pleasing there is a sense that he unwittingly romanticises township life. For it is clear from the development and character of the paintings from this era that while Sekoto was driven by social issues, his subject matter was a vehicle for formal experimentation.

He was clearly playing with chiaroscuro in works such as Four Figures at a Table (1941-2), which shows four card players gathered around a candle that bathes the scene in warm tones that contrast with the dark areas untouched by its glow. For Darroll this painting, which echoes similar scenes that Cezanne and Caravaggio rendered, shows Sekoto’s awareness of art history. The restrained socio-political undertones are vital for her too.
“He wasn’t just this domestic interior painter,” she says.
Generally, the value of work from the apartheid years is measured against its political content.  Sekoto wasn’t quite the protest artist, though after Sharpeville in 1960 he attempted a rendering of that horrific massacre from afar while living in Paris.

In his renderings of township conditions he didn’t relay strife and hardship through contorted or distorted bodies in the expressionist manner that Dumile Feni embraced – artists would only arrive at that approach much later and it is one that hasn’t completely avoided criticism. Police appear in a few of Sekoto’s paintings, most notably in The Roundup (1939), but they are not involved in violent skirmishes. Sekoto seems largely to be registering their presence rather than the impact it may have had.
The matter-of-factness that defines his work evokes the documentary photographer’s mode, though he obviously surrendered to the pleasures of painterly flourishes.

Looking into Marikana: Mary Wafer

Crowd I

The images documenting the strikes and the tragedy that followed at Marikana were subject to an intense form of scrutiny. Initially this was for pragmatic reasons;  via mediated photographic and filmed footage, supplemented and supported by textual accounts, that appeared in the mainstream press or the internet, the majority were able to grasp the tragic events that unfurled at the Lonmin mine near Rustenburg.
As we studied these images, and new images emerged that called into question the police’s conduct and ethics, our gaze intensified as we searched for new evidence or  suppressed facts they might contain.
There was a sense that these images were clues to greater truths beyond the visual realm. This had something to do with the fact that the events were quickly read as symbolic not only of a growing discontent among an exploited and impoverished proletariat, but with Cyril Ramaphosa, aligned to Lonmin, the employers, it evoked the perceived betrayal of the struggle ideals by the country’s new elite.

Our ugly past reverberated through the police’s brutality and the violent actions of the miners. As we surveyed the scenes on this rural landscape, we were, are – the Marikana Commission of Inquiry has yet to be completed – transfixed by the possibility that they function as a window to our past, present and future.
In other words, our gaze is driven by a desire to see beyond, through and around what these images present.
Mary Wafer, more or less, attempts to perform this act in her exhibition Mine. Largely, Wafer works from existing representations documenting events around the massacre and the site itself, though it is stated that she visited it too, perhaps in an effort to reconcile the place with depictions of it.

Through painting she assumes to navigate or generate other kinds of visual representations, where the cold, hard facts, the straight edges of the journalistic mode, have been upturned in favour of a semi-abstract language. It is not complete abstraction; you can still identify the dark figures of the miners crowded together on the koppie in the Crowd series. In fact, in the monochromatic rendering titled Crowd I, the dark silhouettes of seated miners is the only motif on the canvas.

Studio Time: Pondering "productive procrastination" with Nerf/Kentridge /Soyinka/Sellars

Christian Nerf working inside Goethe on Main
pic by: Brett Rubin

One Sunday, during the popular Arts On Main market at Maboneng, some visitors wandered into Goethe-on-Main looking for food. This wasn’t altogether surprising. With a large cardboard handwritten sign hanging at the entrance boasting the show’s title, Things are Odd, it appeared like a makeshift shop – an extension of the market. In a way, Christian Nerf was delighted that this misinterpretation occurred; he revels in rewriting the function of a gallery and blurring the boundaries between art and life.

It’s not quite an anarchic impulse, but more about transforming a space to suit his idiosyncratic needs. For Nerf galleries, rooms in suburban homes, even seats on an airplane or long-distance buses have become home to his itinerant studios. He treats these diverse settings equally, thereby undercutting the gallery’s status. They are not venues to exhibit work but to make work, a place for an artist to inhabit, rather than occupy fleetingly.

“The idea of arriving here putting some things up on the wall and walking out and leaving it was unthinkable,” he says. The gallery should be a living, breathing space, a place of action rather than (detached) meditation. This facilitates interaction, between Nerf and visitors, a rarity in the rarefied art setting. Whether this has enriched his practice is uncertain, but it has made for some unexpected exchanges with people unfamiliar with contemporary art.

A close up of one of Nerf's attempt to "draw with obstacles"
pic by Brett Rubin

For the duration of his show, Nerf spent his days in the gallery, making work, experimenting and reading – I spot a copy of Susan Sontag’s seminal On Photography on a shelf. On the occasions he worked through the night, he slept on a thin mattress in the corner of the gallery. This makeshift bed appears to be part of what could be termed an installation of sorts, though, of course, it has no meaning other than rooting the space as a living space rather than just a gallery. But because it is a gallery, a table populated by tubes of paint, brushes, and a beer bottle, everything in it is subject to the kind of scrutiny that may be undeserving given they are everyday objects. But there are other kinds of objects in the space that look as ordinary but aren’t – if you inspect them closely or become aware of their history. Like a torn vest hanging from a nail.
It’s a remnant from a phase when Nerf went out and “shot” fashion objects, not with a camera but with a weapon that would destroy the surface. There are also more recognisable art objects such as large white papers with colourful painted lines. They are not finished works, more like preparations for something, or just experiments in of themselves.

Mixed Messages: Ian Grose, Andrew Putter and Claudette Schreuders at Stevenson

Dissimulation (Tulips) (2012).

Since winning the Absa L'Atelier award in 2011 for a triptych dubbed Colour, Separation, Ian Grose became hot property. At the opening of Notes, a show presenting work from his residency at the Cité Internationale Des Arts in Paris at the Absa Gallery in Joburg earlier this year, his solo at the Stevenson was cited as further proof of his rapid ascendance.

The artworks seemed to contradict this; they were an underwhelming collection of small paintings of banal subjects - portraits of friends and Cape Town landmarks. While they were tagged as painterly "notes", underscoring that they weren't what the artist considered resolved works, they seemed to lack the charm of spontaneous disjointed ideas. I was left to conclude that the diminutive scale of the paintings had prompted the exhibition's title.

New Paintings, the title of his Stevenson show, may be bland but at least it's non-descriptiveness doesn't generate any expectations. Presumably, this wasn't the motivation; it is more likely the diverse mix of paintings aren't unified by any underlying ideas - unless you can find a way to link studies of folded fabric, flower still lifes and an imploding building.

Some of the paintings, however, evoke a sense of 'collapse' . This idea doesn't manifest in a predictable painterly sort of manner - through the deconstruction or abstraction of form - but is suggested through Grose's choice of subjects and how he isolates them. The studies of imploding buildings in the diptych titled The reconstruction of Pruitt-Igoe map the dissolution of a structure in an obvious way, though the title suggests that through his rendering of the well-documented implosion of this infamous urban housing project in the US, he is reversing the process. In other words, the act of representation is one of reconstitution. So it is that a famously non-existent building is rebuilt via a painting. The work brings to mind the video work Empire (2002) by Kendell Geers in which he replays the implosion of the Twin Towers - - also incidentally designed by the Japanese architect Minoru Yamasaki, who was responsible for the Pruitt-Igoe - backwards so that its annihilation is reversed.