Grahamstown Festival 2010

The Grahamstown Festival 2010

Mary Sibande: Long Live the Queen

The Grahamstown Festival 2010

By Jeanne Wright

Art at the Grahamstown festival is always a mixed bag ranging from high art to street art. It’s finding it… which proves to be the most onerous part of seeing the exhibitions. There are the spaces up at the 1820 Settler’s Monument which vary from the windowless claustrophobic Young Artists gallery where Michael MacGarry’s ‘Endgame’ hangs this year, to the Atherstone Room which was originally designed as a conference venue (complete with translation booths) which showcased the Keiskamma Trust’s homegrown version of Picasso’s “Guernica” – one of the highpoints of the festival art.

MacGarry is a theorist. This exhibition proved to be largely incomprehensible to the average viewer who is not acquainted with his work unless they undertook the special walk-about which shed light on three video installations and two static sculptures, one of which was a replicated AK-47 machine gun – a subject which MacGarry has featured as a fetish object in a number of works. Conceptually pretentious, the grainy video installation stumbled through a grab bag of Africanized subject matter like the Zimbabwe ruins with a sub-plot featuring a Mata Hari and a political assassination, kaleidoscopic manipulation of images and vague tilts at Africa as mother earth/cradle of civilization/the wide beyond. MacGarry’s oeuvre mandates the viewer to make disjunctive shifts from one idea to the next. Even if you were prepared to submit to the artist’s self-indulgence, there was no guarantee that the conclusion you reached was the one that the artist intended.

The imagery of the ‘African Guernica’ was much more accessible complete with an installation of a thorn bush kraal or boma which enclosed clusters of ceramic pots made to commemorate individual lives lost to AIDS. There was also a library of hand-made fabric books which documented individual lives which no longer exist. The appliquéd textile, replicating Picasso’s original painting in Keiskamma vernacular, is an imposing artifact which stretched the length of a cinema screen behind the boma.

In another space close by, the happy art of the Makarapa helmet making was being demonstrated – yet another twist on the inventiveness of street artists to reinvent styles for popular forms.

Down town there were the two museums which, showing increasing signs of wear and tear, housed the important exhibitions – this year, a Biko documentary retrospective, Mary Sibande’s splendid domestic ‘queens’ and Christine Dixie’s introspective and thought-provoking installation entitled ‘The Binding’. The Rhodes University art school gallery is nearby and was hung with an indifferent display of student work which was startlingly apathetic both in concept and imagination, the highlight of which was an elderly chair studded with thousands of toothpicks which owed its genesis to an archival object made by Man Ray. I was struck by the general tenor of existential angst in the art works at the festival this year. ‘Relaas’, an exhibition by Rosemarie Marriott, was made from materials which she gets from taxidermists.

The sculptures, moribund and gothic, were constructed from transparent animal sinews and skin and embellished with dead animal heads. She claims to interpret the way in which a child might perceive aspects of nursery stories. The macabre central piece was a giant spider which loomed over a cluster of faceless baby figures.

Dixie’s subject matter also deals with that of a man child in the context of familial relationships – in this case, her six-year old son. Densely intelligent and layered with meaning on a number of levels, the images portrayed a sleeping child above a serried arrangement of tables (altars) with tightly

packed formations of toy plastic soldiers which looked like sea grass arranged to mirror the shapes of the sleeping child.

An even more obscure installation by Rat Western was stashed away in a remote darkened gallery right at the back of the Museum. The exhibition, entitled “Dead Media”, purported to deal with the relationship between the ‘not alive’ and the ephemeral nature of media – in this case, video and static digital media, which here, presents, as animated, things long dead. Crouching though the gloom to peer at randomly placed illuminated specimen jars holding digital images of artifacts was in itself more of an adventure than the works themselves. Call me old-fashioned but I must admit to certain ennui when it comes to the so-called profundity of installations like that of Western, Marriott and MacGarry. Much of the subject matter appears to have been plucked from a welter of available topics and tortured and tinkered into a post-modernist paradigm which obfusticates and camouflages the fact that content is often vapid and insubstantial and often not processed through in a way which makes for effective communication. By comparison, the Dixie presented a thesis, examined the direct as well as the peripheral information and left the viewer with a sense that the journey undergone with the artist was enlightening and emotionally enriching as well as being visually a technical delight.

For sheer pleasure, albeit with a serious theme which investigated the identity of black women as its central premise, Mary Sibande’s self-referential trio of life-sized black fibreglass “maids” (Sofie) decked out in outrageous layers of pleated organza, taffeta, ruffles and bustles took my vote as the most rewarding art experience of the festival. Imposing, seemingly fragile whilst also quite imperious, these figures with closed eyes, all of whom wore the ubiquitous maid’s apron, have a transcendent presence. As Mary Corrigall so succinctly put it “It’s a cathartic and subversive act…..while the domestic worker appears to have transcended her station, she is similarly trapped in the same paradigm that fixes her as a cleaner….. she is able to explore, ridicule and subvert the structures that victimised the domestic worker.” ( Blog: Incorrigible Corrigall, 5/8/2009).

Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year: Michael MacGarry

Christine Dixie: Offering (Detail), 2009, etching and collograph

Christine Dixie: The Binding (Detail)

Rosemarie Marriot: Relaas Lied van die Kinders

Rosemarie Marriot: Relaas Ring Ringe Rosie

Mary Sibande: Sophie