Venice distilled

16 Aug 2013
16 Aug 2013

Still from Penny Siopis: Obscure White Messenger (2010); Single-channel digital video, sound; Duration 15min, 4sec; Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg

By Brenton Maart

Under the auspices of the National Arts Festival and the Department of Arts and Culture, Brenton Maart is the curator of Imaginary Fact, an exhibition presented on the South African pavilion at the 55th Biennale di Venezia, 2013, showing work by Joanne Bloch, Wim Botha, David Koloane, Donna Kukama, Sam Nhlengethwa, Gerhard and Maja Marx, Philip Miller, Zanele Muholi, Johannes Phokela, Cameron Platter, Andrew Putter, Athi-Patra Ruga, Penny Siopis, James Webb, Sue Williamson and Nelisiwe Xaba. Here, he offers a descriptive list of some works that stood for out for him at this year's Biennale.

Curatorial projects

If there ever was a doubt that contemporary artists and curators are, more and more, finding inspiration in the archive, the 55th Biennale di Venezia is conclusive proof. Previous Biennales, over one hundred years, have shown but a smattering of projects that use records of the past. Gradually, over the years, the numbers of these kinds of projects have increased. Massimiliano Gioni curated this year's key exhibition, drawing its title, The Encyclopedic Palace, from an unrealised imaginary museum designed in the 1950s by Marino Auriti. Meant to 'house all worldly knowledge, bringing together the greatest discoveries of the human race, from the wheel to the satellite' as part of his planning, Auriti built a model of the building with its 136 stories that would, if realised, tower 700 metres into the sky, and sprawl over an area of 16 blocks of Washington DC. Gioni exhibits this model at the entrance to The Encyclopedic Palace, and so uses Auritii's dream as a synecdoche for the innumerable foiled attempts by artists and scientists to capture the infinite richness of the world. The starting point for Gioni's exhibition is the archive.


LEFT: Cameron Platter: The Good Shepard Presents Dr Bombaka (2009); Pencil crayon on paper; 240 x 240cm; Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Ernst Hilger, Vienna

MIDDLE: Sue Williamson: For thirty years next to his heart (1990); 49 colour laser prints in handcrafted frames; Installation dimensions
196 x 262cm; Courtesy of the Artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

RIGHT: Joanne Bloch: Hoard (2012/13); Modelling clay, gold spray-paint, silk velvet and touch-screen panels; Installation dimensions 50 x 500cm; Courtesy of the Artist; Photo by Mario Todeschini

By combining artworks from the past century with contemporary work, historical artefacts and found objects, Gioni notes that the exhibition 'is structured like a temporary museum... blurring the line between professional artists and amateurs, outsiders and insiders... tak[ing] an anthropological approach to the study of images, focusing in particular on the realms of the imaginary and the functions of the imagination... dreams, hallucinations and visions... in an era perplexed by the possible futility of creating an image of the world [whilst] the world itself become[s] increasingly like an image.'

The exhibition begins in the Central Pavilion in the Giardini with an exhibition of Carl Jung's Red Book and, from there, leads into a series of exhibitions of archives of staggeringly expansive collections that Gioni enumerates as follows: Augustin Lesage's symbolic interpretations of the universe; the ecstatic gift drawings of Shaker communities that transcribe divine messages; cosmographies of the invisible by of Guo Fengyi and Emma Kunz; the religious icons and danses macabres of Jean-Frédéric Schnyder; catalogues, collections, and taxonomies including Uri Aran's installations, Carl Andre's personal encyclopedia, Kan Xuan's videos, Shinichi Sawada's bestiaries and Matt Mullican's labyrinths; Yüksel Arslan's encyclopedia plates of an imaginary civilization that resembles a slightly warped version of humanity; R. Crumb's visual chronicle of the book of Genesis, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré's cosmogonies; the legends recounted by Papa Ibra Tall; attempts to decipher the spectacular code of nature in the drawings of Stefan Bertalan, Lin Xue and Patrick Van Caeckenbergh, the films of Gusmão and Paiva, and the photographs of Christopher Williams, Eliot Porter, and Eduard Spelterini; Cindy Sherman's imaginary museum where dolls, puppets, mannequins, and idols cohabit with photos, paintings, sculptures, votive offerings, and drawings by prison inmates to create an anatomical theatre; bodies imagined by Evgenij Kozlov animated by the fantasies of a rapt adolescent, those by Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern enlivened by seductive matrons, those by Kohei Yoshiyuki's are voyeurs; the scopophilic yearning in the paintings by Ellen Altfest who tries to capture and discover the world one inch at a time; Ryan Trecartin's volatile, radically queer, post-human bodies projected into immersive environments...


LEFT: Johannes Phokela:Collar Series (2006); Oil sketch on paper; each 77 x 59cm (frame size); Courtesy of the Artist

RIGHT: Wim Botha: Generic Self-Portrait as an Exile (2008); Learners' dictionaries (Afrikaans, English, isiZulu, Sesotho) and stainless steel;
46 x 32 x 27cm; Courtesy of Michael Roets; Photo by Mario Todeschini

'Through [the] many works on view,' Gioni writes, 'The Encyclopedic Palace [is] an elaborate but fragile construction, a mental architecture as fantastical as it is delirious... based on the impossible desire to concentrate the infinite worlds [into] a single place: a task that now seems as dizzyingly absurd as Auriti's dream.'

My other favourite curatorial project was Imaginary Fact - the exhibition I curated for the South African pavilion. You may think this biased and vain, but it's not. There is a stimulation when engrossed in an act of creation which, when accompanied by the adrenaline of staggeringly tight deadlines, makes for a very exciting experience. Further, all the artists in the show have been formative in my thinking about contemporary archival practice, and I love their work. The subject matter - mapping the growth of an art movement in South Africa where artists increasingly use records from the past to try to understand our contemporary experiences - finds its home within my greater interests in creative archive practices.


Sam Nhlengethwa: Detail from Glimpses of the Fifties and Sixties (2002/3); Series of 30 collage and mixed media works on paper;
36 x 47cm (framed dimensions); Courtesy of Stefan Ferreira; Photo by Mario Todeschini

The research question at the heart of Imaginary Fact understands that the archives accessed by South African artists on the exhibition were constructed within the contexts of, and expressed by aspects of the ideologies of, colonial expansion and high apartheid; that political change has ensued, colonialism and apartheid have been dismantled, with concomitant ideological shifts. The exhibition seeks then in the first instance to track what has happened to these archives and their original intentions and interpretations and, more importantly, to consider what they currently express. The shift in meaning then provides the context that artists engage visually.

Films

Bernd Behr's film Chronotopia tells the tale of Taiwanese Lee Guang-Hui, his conscription by the Imperial Japanese army during the Second World War, a 30-year isolation in Indonesian jungles, being found in 1974 still believing that the war was still ongoing, and repatriation to an unknown home and a language he had forgotten. Berndt's film uses archival materials from different institutional and personal archives from 20th century Taiwan, creating a mesmerising montage that moves between structure and ruin, between human and environment, between power and ideologies, between affect and effect, across time. Accompanied by an audio composed of two tracks that narrate, simultaneously, in Taiwanese and in English, the work creates multiple narratives that sometimes merge, and at other times run parallel, to present a reality that is both fact and fiction; a story that moves from the boundaries of one subjectivity into another.


LEFT: David Koloane: The Journey (1998); Series of 19 acrylic and oil pastel works on paper;
Each 29 x 42cm; Courtesy of the Artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

RIGHT: Philip Miller, Gerhard Marx and Maja Marx: Rewind (2007-2013); Audio-visual installation with monitors and headsets; Dimensions variable; Courtesy of the Artists and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg; Photo by Mario Todeschini

Chronotopia is one of the works on This is not a Taiwan Pavilion, a collateral event curated by Esther Lu in order to investigate the communication devices we invent in order to cope with our contemporary experience where 'social identities and histories are often invented, fictionalized, and appropriated'.

The films of Penny Siopis weave together very different types of archives. For Obscure White Messenger (2010), shown on Imaginary Fact, Siopis re-imagines the death of HF Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid, by the hand of Dimitri Tsafendas, a South African deprived of his land and home. The most striking of juxtapositions in the film is a psychiatrist's interview with Tsafendas (played as text along the bottom of the screen) with found 8mm and 16mm footage of white South African families. The text and the film footage were originally unrelated; within their confines in history, they had different originators, audiences and functions. However, when Siopis splices them together, butts them up against each other, they begin to converse with each other, each supplementing the other as, together, they construct a narrative. Suddenly the films of families at play reveal themselves as evidence of complicity in apartheid; simultaneously the psychiatrist's interview with the 'murderer' reveals the covert practices of an apartheid that relied on obfuscation, misrepresentations, and half-truths... By this creative act of juxtaposition (video montage and narrative collage), Siopis highlights the mutability of meaning, even meaning vested within the archive, that bastion of 'unchanging truth'.


LEFT: David Koloane: The Journey (1998); Series of 19 acrylic and oil pastel works on paper; Each 29 x 42cm; Courtesy of the Artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg

RIGHT: Andrew Putter: Native Work (2012): Installation comprising 15 selenium-toned silver gelatin lightjet prints on fibre-based paper,
50 x 35cm each, and 17 digital colour images on screen, looped; Installation dimensions variable; Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg; Photo by Mario Todeschini

This is a radical approach to creative archival practice, which extends on the traditional approach of using available archival fragments (what is there) to fill the gaps (what is not there), in a bid to construct a more complete and coherent narrative. By combining the tools of historiography and anthropology, these studies rely on extrapolation. Here, proof is never absolute, and the narrative is continually refined and channelled towards the realm of the increasingly probable (the possible). Eventually, this approach reaches a tipping point where no further claims may be generated. It is here that the more unorthodox approach of Siopis becomes an option with the application of a contemporary literary technique, one that merges the documentary (the evidence) with fictional construction (the invention). This practice, termed 'documentary fiction' or 'fictional documentary', extends archival fragments to close the gaps with a narrative approaching the realm of the plausible (the believable). This blurring of genres signals an influential new direction in creative, archival narrative construction, one that celebrates a rare talent: that of productive imagination. Obscure White Messenger has one further importance: by subversion and imaginary reconstruction, the work underlines how ideologies create archives and, reciprocally, how archives themselves create ideologies.


LEFT: Zanele Muholi: Faces and Phases (2006 to date); Series of 200 photographic prints on paper; Each 25.5 x 38.5cm (image size); Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town

RIGHT: Wim Botha: Installation composed of work from 2009 to 2013; Books and hardware; Various dimensions; Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town, and various private collections; Photo by Mario Todeschini

Sculpture

Again I declare my interests, which assert, amongst my favourites at the Biennale, the two bodies of sculpture by Wim Botha on Imaginary Fact. In the first, a series of busts form a procession, with each bust constructed from a specific type of book: Portrait I (2009) is made of crossword dictionaries; Portrait III (2009) of bibles; Untitled (2011) of World Books and SA Yearbooks; Generic Self-Portrait as an Exile (2008) of learners' dictionaries; Untitled (Witness series I) (2011) of African Encyclopaedias; and Composite Self-Portrait II (2010) of dictionaries. These are discrete objects, defined in both their building blocks and in their forms. A certain amount of dogma has gone into their making, and the specificities of their component parts indicate the sector of the dogma. The books, and their content, come pre-loaded, dragging behind them the weight of their histories that then, through sculptural agility, find a new home within new figurative forms. In various ways, various books find their way into the procession of busts, thus consciously or inadvertently addressing institutionalised attribution. Drawing on Hal Foster's writing on the 'theoretical elaboration of museological temporality and cultural temporality', Okwui Enwezor writes that 'like institutions dedicated to collecting, categories of meaning accrue and are built up over time and are reframed according to institutional ideology'. Enwezor's writing on 'representations of representation' engaging 'new modalities of engagement' may be used to describe the objects on show. Phrased differently, the works highlight an epistemology of self-criticality by interrogating their activities and roles in the fields within which they operate, as they form a procession leading to Botha's second contribution to the exhibition.

Unlike its single-component precursors, Study for the Epic Mundane (2013) brings together a range of book types. And unlike the busts, Study is seemingly physically incomplete, becoming increasingly fragmented with each new viewing. Sequences become splintered. Instead of generating a 'bigger picture' as the busts seem to lean towards, Study seemstolay bare provisional change; to revel in a situational contingency that flies in the face of the traditional approach to researching, recording, analysing and presenting historical information. This, in effect, subverts the arrogance of the modernist method of writing history: one ideology, one writer, one story that - through its prescription - becomes the prevailing dogma. Instead, Botha appears to employ a decentralised approach to presenting his modernist subjects with (if I dare use this word) a post-modern sensibility. Within Study, each type of book leads to a different set of data that coalesce within the figures, and then break up again into multiple and discontinuous narratives. Unlike the sombre monolithic busts, Study delights in figures that are fragmented and discontinuous; ambiguous; simultaneously form and non-form; destructured, decentred, dehumanised. Unlike the busts with their leaning towards an impossible harmony, consistency, rationality and significance, Study revels in entropy, in the existence of the interim, in the incoherence experienced during dynamic flux, making a remarkable contribution to the construction of the method of the open-ended conclusion.


Wim Botha: Study for the Epic Mundane (2013); Books (encyclopaedia, bibles, dictionaries, historical documents, etc.), wood and stainless steel;
Central group: 155 x 188 x 183cm; Installation dimensions variable; Courtesy of the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg; Photo by Mario Todeschini

Performances

The national pavilion of Romania performed An immaterial retrospective of the Venice Biennale where, continuously during its exhibition, five performers enact selected works from the Biennale since its inception more than a century ago. What a delightful afternoon, sitting on the floor in a big white empty room, watching performances of sculpture, paintings, film, drawings... Created by Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmus,An immaterial retrospective presents both an archive of the Biennale, and an archive of the frameworks within which the now-performed works were created.

Curator Raluca Voinea writes that: 'By turning the monumental into the immaterial and the object into action, by enacting history, the project also transforms this history; it actualizes it. It is a simultaneous affirmation and undoing, an attempt to archive which is at the same time turned against the weight of the archive, of the storage, of the labels and keys of reading that come with it. The work is appealing to the public's memory only to reveal its constructed nature and to question how memories are selected, who is reminding us what and by which means.'


Athi-Patra Ruga: The Future White Women of Azania - The trial (2013); Site-specific performance with five performers, costumes, props, lights and music; Duration variable; Courtesy of the Artist and whatiftheworld Gallery; Photo by Giovanna Zen

There is no greater example of this curatorial intention than in the performance of Marina Abramovic's video Confession (exhibited in Venice in 2011). In the artwork, composed of one continuous take, Abramovic kneels before a donkey and, using silence, confesses to a childhood plagued by machismo and war. The confessor's lips don't move; her thoughts are shown as sub-titled text on the video. The cognition between Abramovic and the donkey makes real the absurdity of the mental telepathy required to fully understand this form of communication, compounded by the increased obfuscation caused by processes of translation, mediation and interpretation.

Jay Pather, a member of the exhibition's curatorial committee, describes how the evolution of live art 'emerged from what was known as performance art to include new media that does not necessarily have a performer. Traces of performance art emerged in the late 1800s in Europe, culminating at the beginning of the twentieth century in such movements as the Dadaists and the Futurists. But while these movements were happening, for example, Picasso was deriving much of his inspiration from the African continent. [Thus] the combination of performing and the visual and plastic arts was very much part of this continent, especially in such events as rituals and ceremonies.'

'In the 1970s and 80s in South Africa, however, another kind of more anarchic live art began to emerge from the fringes of art making, giving this ephemeral form weight, history and focus. It has become impossible to ignore the great mavericks who transcend disciplinary boundaries with work that speaks directly to immediate experience and ironically requires fewer codes to understand what is going on.'

It is within this realm that Athi-Patra Ruga'sworks, with his public performances ofThe Future White Women of Azania, were presented as part of Imaginary Fact. Although the earliest mention of Azania dates back to Pliny the Elder (born in AD 23), the first mention of the name in a South African context appears in the 1930s reports of archaeological diggings at Mapungubwe, and it is here that Ruga's mythological queendom finds her roots. Given more recent political grounding by the later Azanian People's Organisation (or Azapo, a South African liberation organisation formed in 1978 as an offshoot of the Black Consciousness Movement philosophy of Steve Biko), Ruga takes this ostensibly masculine history and imbues it with a queerness underlined, not least, by the impertinence of the skewed stance.