Simpler, Better, Faster, Please. Carine Zaayman at Irma Stern
Friday, August 10, 2007
Went down to the Irma Stern Museum on Tuesday to catch Carine Zaayman's The Secret Adventures of Lady Anne Barnard. The highlight of the evening was being shouted at by Kirsty Cockerill for giving her show (3c at the AVA) a good review. First time that's ever happened. Last time that'll ever happen. The low point of the evening was the eventual realisation that the empty table was not be laden with snacks. Sigh. Another of life's grand disappointments.When I went upstairs a bit later to look at the art, I struggled to stay. The work claimed to present excerpts from Lady Anne Barnard's diary and letters (some old bird who lived at the Castle, before the army), and then somehow reset it to makes us re-examine familiar areas around Cape Town. Now, I'm all for the reinterpretation, butchering, rewriting, fictionalising, hacking, recontextualising or recreating of history. I think it is a very useful thing to do, considering the somewhat traumatic nature of our state/world. And I love old texts. However, what I really need when looking at this kind of work is a handle, a little lifeline to draw me in, and I think when dealing with art this handle is often aesthetic. The Secret Adventures of Lady Anne Barnard, was missing this. To say the least, the prints on the show were ugly, with very obvious photoshop marks, odd compositions and clumsy drawings overlaid, the colours weren't subtle and the tonal range was bland. They didn't even begin to draw me in beyond the surface, let alone start to construct a narrative, or even give me a sense of the Lady's personality. Presenting large paragraphs of text on the images also doesn't captivate my attention. A similar problem existed in the video piece on display, the pixellization of the images disturbed me, and seemed so anachronistic to the Lady in question, that I struggled to follow what was going on.
Often it seems to me that people that deal with issues through a narrative tend to obscure it when they change it into something acceptable to them as art. Both the story and the art end up unintelligible.
Labels: Carine Zaayman
posted by Robert Sloon at 10:45 AM
4 Comments:
so what do i know about lady anne barnard? Hm, not too much. Except that I have glanced at her drawings and browsed her writings. Here is the thing: Apart from being a (THE) powerful woman of her time, courtesan of note, she could write and she could draw. In fact, she is probably one of the few early setrtlers who could draw. Perhaps she used some kind of veiwing device...? Her spaces, fauna and flora and people are all believable, They are persausive representtions of observations. That is clear. And in the absence of photographs, her renditions are as good a record as we get...And therefore ( the same is true of her writings) a certain pleasure can be had from reading this record she left behind.
Actually, she was so skilled that if Lady Anne Barnyard herself were to present - by some feat of reincarnation or other temporal relocation- a show of her own contemporary work at the Irma, we would probably be lining up in Cecil Street right now, waiting for the doors to open.
That's , kind of, The Situation....
you suck!
the colonial aristocracy were so charming
Hey I must do a bit of cyber fellatio and agree with you Robert. I also saw Zayman’s show on the Tuesday night but then sucked in my pride and went to the ‘gallery walk’ that she was doing at 10am on Womans’ Day (perhaps this was rather apt) and I found in the work a similar problem. Zayman jabbered on for over an hour about the art, her artistic process, etc. and even offered a comparison between her life and Lady Anne’s – a long shot to say the least. At the end of it I think the audience (mostly pensioners and a few colleagues I am guessing) got some good insight into the work, but without all this background info one struggled (as I did on Tuesday night, tipsy as I was) to gauge any kind of point of entry for the work. The Photoshoppy, pseudo-vernacular aesthetic was just plain crap and looked tacky and kitsch. Sure, there was a lot that went into the work as far as I could tell from the hour long talk, but does a bit of research, a bit of stolen text, a few cropped snapshaots and some bad ink drawings get one into a space like the Erma Stern. I think research like this is best presented in something like a book, not in a framed, gaudy print on archival paper. And god, enough with all the personal symbolism and shit. It just can get to the point (as it does here) were it just ends up clouding the work, making it vague, unattractive, and pathetically ineffective as art.
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home