Present>Past
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Going to Stellenbosch can seem like reenacting the Great Trek if you don't have a car, but I was bribed to head out to the ECC Forward>March exhibition with the promise of two free T-shirts.
The End Conscription Campaign itself is a strange thing, it's hard to separate the lefty nostaganda (or propolgia, maybe) and the actual political impact the ECC had. I'm not trying to be a disgusting cynic, but sometimes these kinds of celebrations glorify something which was a tough reality. It reads more as a reunion than a serious examination of the past. And reunions are good and important. Considering that I was 2 when the Campaign was founded and in Standard 3 when it was disbanded, I should probably shut my flap.
The show Forward>March was similarly hard to judge, but this I suspect because it lacked a clarity of focus. The contemporary stuff on the show was very tenuously connected, often being loosely about war, or just conflict in general. Pulled together they read as slacktivism, a weak "dealing with issues" as opposed to powerful individual protest (although one suspects that all art is in fact slacktivism until it gets out of the gallery). Daniel Halter's Untitled (Zimbabwean Queen of Rave), one my favourite works, stood out here, as the connection between party and protest seemed appropriate.
The works of the older artists seemed dusty. One really wanted to see some of the vibrancy that the poster exhibition next door revealed. Many of these works are really important in the resistance canon, but where was the underground, the spirit of the times. Some of that was seen in the early Anton Kannemeyer Bitterkomix works, but I wanted more more more anger or something. It's hard to tell though, if this is my own disappointment with the past or if it is a disappointment in the show.
But the T-shirts made me happy.
posted by Robert Sloon at 1:39 PM
5 Comments:
Hahaha @ Slacktivism. Brilliant.
Yeah, the stuff which meant something to you was the stuff you were familiar with, and knew the background of, and the working methods of. I think a lot of it has dated really badly, and its hard to empathise with stuff that once appeared edgy, a bit like looking at gungy old bits of Cubism that start looking like 70's dinner-plate decor in Pick 'n Pay after a while. But really, a lot of that stuff was edgy in its day, even if it was very earnest and very Modernist. Promise.
Back then it didn't take much to look edgy or stand out because of the pervasive cultural vacuum. The faintest gesture of anger or expression, paint dribbles, mock blood slogans and rusting found objects cobbled together, and you were the big fish.
Once the vacuum was released, and many other cultural artefacts were sucked into this orbit, the anaemic qualities of these gestures was made evident. Of course this anaemia was a symptom of cultural isolation and the 'dusty works' are a testament to this. The patient however can now be treated, a simple iron supplement may suffice, otherwise the odd injection in the subcutaneous tissue might be necessary.
The problem is that many of our anaemics refuse to be treated and persist with their thin soup vision of yesteryear. Too many of these, suckled during the lean years, cling to the comfortable chairs within our cultural systems. We may have to wait a generation or two for these to move on so that we can lubricate the machine. And finally, without wanting to condemn the endeavour I do think that the curators here could have added a bit of more meat to the bones that they called dinner, I still feel empty.
Don't worry Zonder, your time for going out of date lies ahead, about two years away.
Anon 9h46 yawn. gasp. moan.
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