I hate the term "unpack". Anyone who ever claims to unpack a notion through an artwork only took one outfit with them on holiday.

Anyway, you might have guessed, I've been over at Whatiftheworld. Not physically, because my bicycle is broken, but online to take a look at Xander Ferreira's solo Status of Greatness. It's quite an interesting way of looking at art. Digital compression hides the 'truth' of the photograph, as in some information is left out. Photographic compression hides some of the reality, because again some information is left out. It starts to remind me of Borges (or is it Baudrillard) talking of the Cartographer who makes a map the exact size of the Empire. But here the map precedes the reality. Anyway, I digress.

There's been a whole lot of commentary on this show in the bars across Cape Town, with a bunch of people calling it racist and insensitive and a bit of arguing going down. I'm not going to get too far into that issue... either it's brrrr on the Coke side of life or it's not. There's a whole trend of Afropop at the moment, a rerepresentation or appropriation of certain types of vernacular fashion and design into an 'African' language. You can see it in diverse places from Peet Pienaar's design stuff through to Chicken Licken ads. Obviously, developing an African identity is good, freeing itself from Western culture to an extent, while obviously the homogenising factors of an African identity is a little problematic. Then the question of whether a White African Male can appropriate elements of this identity (and playing with that Dictator look) is moral or immoral seems to me to be matter of taste and approach. Miles Keylock over at the M&G calls it "Pieter Hugo meets Monty Python" which I think sums it up quite nicely. It has the politics and monotony of Hugo, with the humour and ridiculousness of Monty Python. The only thing missing is the driving push for an identifiable brand of a musician. The problem I find with the show is it doesn't push hard enough, each image is the same idea even if the location changes. Changing the background and one prop is not enough for me to get any sense of Fereirra's character Gazelle. It could have been an amazing opportunity for art directors and stylists to go wild. Unpack.










There is one image worth talking about, being the one sitting on top of this post. It is a painting of a photo by one of those Chinese painting sweatshops. Tucked somewhere between the white man, the symbols of African power, the oil representation (in itself an outdated but legible representation of power) and the entrepreneural zeal of China, we start to get a slightly more accurate portrayal of African identity, and maybe, just maybe we start to unpack the real status of greatness.