Some Art History
2014
Michaelis School of Fine Art Graduate Exhibition
Some Art History considers a mediated experience of the traditional canon of Western Art History and its objects. Borrowed and second-hand, the reality of this Art History is that of the replica, the copy, the translation, those mediums of transmission from Western ‘centre’ to South African ‘periphery’. Some Art History presents an accumulation of negotiated art historical fragments, highlighting incongruous points of contact between disparate times and places; revealing curious discontinuities and idiosyncrasies in their contextual asymmetry. These considerations reflect a strangely abiding attachment to the story of Art History, a story contextually and ideologically dislocated from contemporary South Africa. A story that is at once familiar and peculiarly inaccessible, both immediate and estranged.
A Story of Art (Ladder), 2014, saligna, galvanised steel, fabric, and digital prints on paper, 95 x 55 x 170 cm
Photo credit: Andrew Juries
In the story of art, as told in Some Art History, one character stands apart, ubiquitous and predominant, the epitome of the twentieth-century avant-garde and a compelling historic presence in contemporary art: Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp provides the strategy for addressing a discursive history in its entirety, the conceptual device with which Some Art History negotiates Western Art History from a South African perspective. The multitude of incidents and accidents, the recurrent themes and indelible images, the lives of great men – the story of Western art becomes a single readymade.
Fountain Series, 2014, inkjet pigment prints on cotton rag, dimensions variable
Photo credit: Sitaara Stodel and Heinrich Minnie
If art is either ‘plagiarism or revolution’* the objects in Some Art History are resolutely the former – illustrating fictions more seductive than the real thing, a preference for reproductions and for mediated experiences. They function in different registers; some allude to objects or themes that recur in the Art History narrative; others operate as visual analogies of progression and dispersion. The materiality of the objects and images engages with the techniques and mediums that transmit and disperse art and its histories over great distances of geography and time. Additionally, and more importantly, each object fulfils Duchamp’s primary prerequisites for readymades: that they be both familiar and indifferent**.
A Story of Art (Garden Venus), 2014, saligna, cement, marble powder and resin, 79 x 47 x 119cm
Photo credit: Andrew Juries)
Yet the objects in Some Art History are not simply readymades but simulated readymades; each object is a fabrication of another, an imperfect copy. The vaguely absurd act of replicating objects proposes a double entendre, at once instilling an unassuming object with the aura of handiwork (of time) and denying this aura with the act of copying. Indifferent objects – mundane, banal, quotidian – twice-removed; delay made manifest through the distancing tactic of studied fabrication.
A Story of Art (Stack), 2014, duotone lithographic prints on 130gsm Munken Lynx, pine, 50 x 70 x 25cm
Photo credit: Andrew Juries
* After Marcel Duchamp’s definition of art along a similar trajectory.
** “You have to approach something with an indifference, as if you had no aesthetic emotion. The choice of the readymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste.” (Duchamp in Thierry de Duve’s Kant After Duchamp (1996), pg. 395)
