Gordon Froud | a Retrospective of all the Exhibitions I Never Had by Neil Nieuwoudt

G OR DON FROU D | a R e t r o s p e c t i v e o f A l l t h e E x h i b i t i o n s I N e v e r H a d

12 MAY - 05 JUNE 2013

I N TROD UCT I ON Gordon Froud is a well-known artist, lecturer and curator who has been actively involved in the art world for more than 30 years. He has become known for his modular sculptures of viruses, taxis, animals and other objects and is sometimes referred to as the “coat hanger guy” due to his prodigious use of these as a sculptural medium. He is currently on show at Nirox Sculpture Park as part of the AFTER THE RAINBOW NATION | 2013 contemporary South African sculpture exhibition. Froud has consistently shown on more than 20 shows a year often working in a variety of forms and mediums suited to the theme or guidelines of a particular show. Although recognizable as his work, few viewers make the connection with the diverse range of approaches used by this versatile artist. For this show A Retrospective of Exhibitions I Never Had, he has selected to show these “other” works. The works on show include: bronze casts, ceramic plates, artist’s books, photography, digital printing, etching, linocut, wood carving and drawing amongst others. This show of more than 80 works has common threads of humor and found objects as source or medium that run through them. As a body of work, seen together for the first time, the hand and eye of the artist is patently obvious even in the diversity of approach.

Various installation views at the opening of A Retrospective of All the Exhibitions I Never Had on 12 May 2013 | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

O P EN ING S PE ACH B Y D AV ID PATO N “After visiting Gordon here on Friday to get my head around this body of work, I went to SiBono to see the Body Worlds exhibition. There I encountered a wall text attributed to Arthur Schopenhauer. It read: A man must have grown old and lived long in order to see how short life is. This notion of the shortness of life is something which both Gordon and I have for various reasons contemplated recently: both having gone over 50 years of age. Perhaps this is why a typical ‘week in the life of Gordon Froud’ is described thus: “What a week! Afrika Burns - Tom Waits for no Man - Typology Typography and Topology at University of North West and Now my solo show ‘A retrospective of shows I never had’ opens on Sunday at noon”. Gordon and I have known each other for 30 years, both having links with Germiston, the Wits Fine Art department in the bleakest of the so-called ‘Crumpian Golden Years’, became school teachers and gravitated to the TWR and now UJ. We are close friends and so I want to say a few things today which might, hopefully, act as a form of re-assessment of Gordon’s work and undercut what I can only describe as often insultingly frivolous readings which often bedevil the reception of exhibitions of his work. Perhaps those of us who have looked carefully at this selection of work, from the Cooling Tower of 1983 to the work of a few weeks ago (& I am particularly delighted to find the series of drawings The Five Senses and One from 2002 on only its 2nd public showing) might already have discerned an inkling of Gordon’s darker, more sombre, serious and critical eye. It is always revealing when an artist is their own curator, something utterly more visceral, more personal and challenging often emerges. For those who want nothing more than witty semantic word play and whimsical, repetition of cunningly placed every-day objects in delightful but gentle self-parody – I suppose there might be some of that here, but that is not really what Gordon has put together, not really what I believe he has invited us here to see. Gordon, when you gave me, as a gift after your Masters show, your magnifying glass circle titled 20/20 Vision, I suspected that you offered it as a challenge for me to view your work with crystal clarity and magnified perception. So here goes! Upstairs you will encounter some 20 small framed images of various international moments of note ranging from Churchill in France 1918 to FW de Klerk meets Mandela 1994. Inserted into these scenes is an Elvis Presley impersonator which looks suspiciously ‘Froudian’ – a bricollage of presence disguised as humour yet tinged with a succinct reminder that the artist’s scope must be all-seeing, all present otherwise the artist has nothing to say. Elvis himself asks for: A little less conversation, a little more action please A little more bite and a little less bark A little less fight and a little more spark … as if supposedly post-mortem sightings of the man are true and he, disguised as Froud disguised as Presley marks his presence as a macabre witness to the themes of war and peace: documenting almost exactly a year before Presley’s reported death, Antoinette Sithole and Mbuyisa Makhubo carrying and 12-year-old Hector Pieterson 1976 (and a pieta worthy of Michelangelo’s chisel) in another, translating for both Reagan and Gorbachov in 1985 (this one reminding me of Michelangelo’s divine furia whispering darkly into the ears of old testament prophets and pagan sibyls alike on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel) and in another, making it tentatively over the Berlin Wall for the 1st time in 1989. Gordon wants us to witness these odd, voyeuristic and intrusive acts of bravery and mortality, otherwise why do they exits and why are they here? Well, perhaps an answer lies down here, at the start of that wall. Below a thin band of Froudian wanna-be mugshots (where Gordon’s true identity is suggested as slippery, negotiable and shifting rather than merely funny or playful) we are confronted with a small meditation on mortality. Titled Autumnal thoughts or Kafka’s Castle saved my life Gordon suggests a serendipitous relationship between the parts which make up the book: cover image of a Froudian silhouette and window, densely packed paper pages which act as a deflecting mechanism for a bullet surely meant to kill him and the content of the book, a story which Gordon dislikes on so many levels! Dark and at times surreal, The Castle is often understood to be about alienation, bureaucracy, the seemingly endless frustrations of man’s attempts to stand against the system, and the futile and hopeless pursuit of an unobtainable goal. Kafka, himself died without finishing a book in which no-one seems able to get access to the castle or its bureaucrats. The villagers hold the officials and the castle in the highest regard, justifying, quite elaborately at times, the actions of the officials which are never explained; they simply defend it as being absurd any other way. For me The Castle seems to have opened up, under gunfire, a Froudian view of the world which is equally absurd, darkly comical, alienated and futile. It seems then that the ominous Shadow and Viruses I, II & III in which children play with and in the shadow of viruses which might in all eventuality kill them is most appropriately placed within coughing distance from The Castle. Our bleak reading needs no more appetising accompaniment than that slut Alice bending over provocatively in The Last Tea Party accompanied by her paranoid carving knife-wielding digital cousin American McGee’s Alice – the protagonist from the third-person action video game, containing psychological horror elements. Gordon references the unauthorised sequel to Lewis Carroll’s Alice novels, set years after Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, which features an older, more cynical and macabre incarnation of Alice. In Adam and Eve perhaps Gordon asks the question ‘If women penetrated men, how different would our world be?’.

We are surely in the presence of a Gordon Froud who, since at least 1983 has trawled a human underbelly which we are sometimes too eager to ignore, happier to look another way, revelling in the witty titles of modular units made from amusingly banal objects (The Circle of Grateness being my personal favourite): the curatorial joviality and sometimes irreverent humour of group exhibitions such as A little BIG THING” - a show of erotic miniatures, Buttons, Ties, A little Show of Drawers, and more recently, Altered Pieces and Tom Waits for no Man. Waits’s famous lyrics “I want a sink and a drain / and a faucet for my fame” seem to also describe the seemingly mundane elements upon which Gordon has built his fame. But a look inside his portfolio of prints, wonderfully photographed by Carla Crafford and stood guard over by Mummyboy, a tribute to Tim Burton’s character, quickly upsets any notion of the ordinary object as mundane. This work alone is a Pandora’s Box, setting off dialogical collisions between Kitsch, the crass, the macabre and the pathetic, made all the more memorable when one considers the references at play here. No one viewing this work and indeed this show can be in any doubt about the density and gravity at work here: mined from an intimate knowledge of the music of Pink Floyd, Nick Cave, Rod McKuen and Laurie Anderson and many others, while no one, aware of the darker war references at play in Aardman Animations’ Chicken Run and the insanity of man’s self-importance, ridiculed in the genius of Gary Larson’s The Far Side will be able to view Gordon’s print Portable Chicken of Despair with any degree of neutrality. Knowing Gordon as I do, I read here an acute, encyclopaedic melancholia: someone deeply entrenched in the music, literature, film and visual art of human despair and their implications for living in South Africa today. The wall hanging This Place / Displace for the Georges Bizos Xenophobia show (hanging at the west entrance, the set of 3 self-portrait prints in which the face succumbs to the infections virus like something out of Ridley Scott’s Alien, the infamous Sperm Babies, referencing as I read them thalidomide babies born in the post WW2 era and Blue Velvet, most recently exhibited a Christiaan Diedericks Velvet exhibition at KKNK (and referencing the film noir and sinister surrealism of David Lynch’s movie) and of course this Beetle ‘canopy’ (an ode to a technological and cultural past, disarmingly resurrected here), the two references to Eva Hesse (in the corners) all bare testimony to the collective and diverse anxieties of being in this moment and in this place. As teachers, both Gordon and I desire nothing more in our students than evidence of a thinking mind made visible through a thinking hand. We have such evidence here in spades. The Froudian body of work, which Gordon has chosen for us here (and this body has hardly made a dent back in his studio), re-imagines his audiences response, deconstructs any false comfortability with which we might have come to regard his work and challenges us with content which, while never having been polite, never having been without its wry and often black wit, reimagines a deeper, bleaker, edgier, more critical world. In such a Froudian world the lines of a song, or the lyrics of a poem heard deep in the night copulate with the ingrate experiences of the day, and red-wine enlightened, are given form in a body of work which can no longer be couched in the reductive terms of ‘mere’ modular repetition or humour (This modularity is after all a visualised Cartesian folly, in a way by which to map the structure of all things) Those of you here today, who are able to write well about such things, I challenge you to write the first monograph of one of South Africa’s foremost and challenging artists. You could start right here, could you not? Thank you.” 12 May 2013

--- DAVID PATON

David Paton is a Senior Lecturer: Department of Visual Arts at University of Johannesburg

The Last Teaparty | Digital print on archival paper | 44 x 76cm (paper size) | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

The Businessman - after Robert Hodgins | Cast aluminium | 18,5 x 38,5 x 1,5cm | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

A Tribute to Eva Hess II | Wire, plastic and cable ties | 35 x 35 x 146cm | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

A Long Walk to Freedom in Van Riebeeckâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Shoes | Found objects reworked | 40 x 25 x 23cm | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

2 Cases to be Made (a) - Been There | Found objects recontextualised | 40 x 54 x 52cm (in open position) | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

2 Cases to be Made (b) - Wish I had Been There | Found objects recontextualised | 55 x 16 x 55cm (in open position) | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Two Imagined Self Portraits | Bronze | 16 x 15 x 8cm and 12 x 21 x 12cm | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Blue Velvet | Digital print and found objects reworked | 37 x 84 x 185cm (incl. stand) | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

The Holey Book of Alice | Artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Book (unique) | 34 x 50 x 42cm (excl box) | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Cut it out Alice | Artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s book | 21 x 32 x 32cm | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Cooling Tower Jersey | Bronze | 15 x 15 x 25cm | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Sad Monument | Found objects reworked | 18 x 18,5 x 23cm | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Self Portrait | Carved wood, mirror, pop rivets, and bottlecaps from Mozambique | 37 x 22 x 29cm | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Adam and Eve | Digital print on archival paper | 46 x 60cm (framed) | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

3 Virus Plates | Ceramic and glaze | 29,5cm diameter | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

(t-b) Viral Interventions I, II and III (with Goodness Nhlengethwa) | Digital print on archival paper | 20 x 41cm (paper size) | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Lost & Found Vol 1, 2 & 3 | Artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s book in perspex case | 10 x 22 x 174,5cm (in perspex case) | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Retro Virus | Found objects reworked | 40 x 40 x 40cm | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Lotus Flower | Found objects reworked | 90 x 152 x 90cm | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Green Virus | Bronze | 9 x 9 x 9cm | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Spermbaby | Glass unique | 31 x 19 x 22cm | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

A Tribute to Dumeli Feni | Ceramic | 28 x 26 x 17cm | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Spermbaby | Bronze | 25 x 19 x 13cm | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Spermbaby | Terracotta unique | 22 x 14 x 13cm | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Trinity | Plaster of paris | 25 x 25 x 16cm | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

5 Senses plus One | Mixed media drawing on paper | 49 x 39cm (framed, each) | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Oriental Virus | Aluminium and steel | 50 x 50 x 50cm | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

A Tribute to Claes Oldenburg & Coosjie van Bruggen | Found objects reworked | 44 x 17 x 20cm | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Basket Case | Found objects reworked | 113 (diameter) x 13,5cm (deep) | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Arms Dealer | Found objects reworked | 220 x 130 x 100cm | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Volkswagen Beetle | Chromed metal hangers and cable-ties | 180 x 360 x 140cm | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Tessellated | Plastic coat hangers and cable ties | 370 x 380cm | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Orange Symmetry | Found objects reworked | 73 x 29 x 29cm | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Double Up Buddha | Mixed media | 60 x 33 x 30cm | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Spikey Animals | Mixed media | 23 x 11 x 12cm (each) | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

A Tribute to Eva Hess I | Wire and cable ties | 29 x 27 x 27cm | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Elvis has left the building | Found images reworked | Dimensions variable | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

The Fall and Rise | Digital print on archival paper | 67 x 61,5cm (framed) | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Strange Angel | Bronze | 28 x 32 x 4cm (size of box, closed) | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

Flaming Heart Splat | Aliminium embossing | 52 x 38,5cm (framed) | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

New York East and West Sides (with Mario Picolli) | Unique artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s book | Dimensions variable | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

This Place / Displace | Unique digital print on vinyl | 160 x 129cm | Gordon Froud | NIROXprojects

BIOGRAPHY Gordon Froud has been actively involved in the South African and international art world as artist, educator, curator and gallerist for 30 years. He has shown on hundreds of solo and group shows in South Africa and overseas. Froud graduated with a BA (FA) Hons from the University of Witwatersrand in 1987, a Higher education Diploma from the same university in 1987 and a masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s degree in Sculpture from the University of Johannesburg in 2009 where he runs the Sculpture department as a Senior lecturer. He has taught continuously at school and tertiary level in South Africa and in London since 1990. He has curated numerous group exhibitions that have traveled the country. Froud directed gordart Gallery in Johannesburg from 2003 to 2009 where he showcased the work of new, up and coming artists. He regularly shows on more than 20 exhibitions a year including showing in Washington, Holland and Paris this year. Last year, he developed a range of innovative furniture that was launched at Design Indaba. He was selected as the first Site â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Specific artist in Residence at Plettenberg Bay for 2012 and his work was selected for a large exhibition of South African Sculpture in the Hague in May last year.

For more information contact Neil Nieuwoudt on T: +27 72 350 4326 or E: neil.nieuwoudt@gmail.com Catalogue layout and design: Neil Nieuwoudt Photo credit: Laetitia Lups NIROXprojects | ARTS ON MAIN | MABONENG PRECINCT | JOHANNESBURG 249 Fox Street, cnr Main Rd, Arts On Main +27 72 350 4326 www.niroxarts.com