Another fine one from Lizza, a review of Avant Car Guard's recent Naked Frontier Ambition Vibes at What if the world...:

Having discovered how wrong I was to write a review about pictures in a dining room, I decided to draw this review instead. Following are a few notes to go with the drawing.

I really liked this show. I find Avant Car Guard inspiring to the degree where I can see how it would be nice to actually be an artist. Perhaps the reason for this is they work with such a range of artistic practices, giving one the opportunity to be excited about the whole range at once. For a start, and close to my heart, they don't separate painting and drawing from conceptual art and performance. Instead, they make it impossible to separate them.

In this particular show the whole thing was so simple it was like walking into a cartoon, the way one did with Cameron Platter's show at Blank. The tree, though unexplained, came across to me as those trees Piet Mondrian used to draw so obsessively, on his utopian modernist quest for finding perfect natural balance with which he intended, quite without irony, to solve the political problems of the world. So the tree itself was an installation, a sculpture, a drawing, a painting and a discussion. With the tensions about Africa and Europe that were the subject of the photographs, it seemed to me that the artists, crouching in their makehshift fort, were marginalised South Africans living out their embattled relationship with European art, embodied by the tree. Maybe they were, maybe they weren't.

A smoke-machine pumped out a thick mist, which curled like watercolour around the gallery and out into the darkness. It blended with the white walls and floor to create the visual impression of a snowy woodland, a fake European microclimate, a bit like the ones South Africans usually see on Christmas cards.