It's been a while since I've been at 34 on Long. I think it's mostly because I always get the auction feeling when I'm there. The scent of money that makes one look at one's own career with apprehension. But I was in the area yesterday so I dropped in, to find a really nicely curated show downstairs. It was loosely curated, as in the theme didn't hit you in the face, but was a pleasure to explore. It mostly consisted of a certain graphical style of work and a bright handling of colour moving from Kentridge through to young graffiti artists like Motel7 and Rist. It also had some examples of my least favourite artists like Paul du Toit and Norman Catherine, but you could see why they were there. Which made it better. My favourite moment: All these graf kids doing work on canvas paired with an Esther Mahlangu work on canvas. I thought that was a really smart parallel.


Upstairs was new work by Adrian Kohler entitled Benefit of Doubt. He's one these artists who are spectacularly talented technically, a genius woodcarver that the content seizes to matter. Which is why it took me a little while to realize that this show was a hodge-podge of an artist searching for a new direction or even maybe a voice and needed either to be edited or pushed further. For example, there was the beautifully carved exploded view of a drill, which is purely an exercise in carving excellence, an examination of the tools with tools. It's very similar to his previous work. Then some strange and clumsy figurative sculpture, meteors and ming vases, which seemed totally lost. And then works in entirely different media, an axe made of polystyrene, a plastic ship (which was my favourite piece, with a nice snake twisting around a childhood hobby, like a bad memory) and cast resin. And a hammer turned into a penis which seemed familiar. This new direction showed promise of better metaphors (hammer/dick metaphor beats "Surprise! Its wooden" metaphor) and content. It would be nice to see it really teased out.