Some Thoughts on Dada South?
Thursday, January 07, 2010
Admittedly I am still a youngster, but I think looking back over the decade, Dada South? will prove to be the most significant of the big South African blockbuster shows, at least from a local context.
While Africa Remix made waves around the world, and was probably the biggest, most significant show of African art we'll see even in the next ten years, and Picasso in Africa got the hinges on the National Gallery's door swinging and the Tropics: Views from the middle of the globe unfortunately did not (am I forgetting anything important here? Cape 07?), Dada South? has two factors which I think will prove impactful. Firstly, it was an examination of how local production was affected by Western art in a positive way, by a movement which is increasingly seen to hold the roots of most contemporary art production. Secondly, it revisited a chunk of 80's South African art. This second is important. As we drift through our second decade of democracy, looking back is becoming both easier and more necessary. A little distance gives us the leeway to reinterpret and revision (as this show does), but also the opportunity to look critically at where we come from.
Another factor which makes this show a hit is the pure awesomeness of seeing some of these works. Who thought they'd ever see a Hannah Hoch, a Hans Arp, a Man Ray. Or some of the artifacts, like the original R. Mutt article, the old journals and Caberet Voltaire invites. Even local stuff I'd read about but never seen (Fook Island stuff, old Willem Boshoff's). On the downside though, this show really needed to open with a catalogue, a guide through the sometimes obscure bits and pieces and an entry point into some of the narratives and histories.
There are some seminars coming up, and I think they are vital to attend. This show will expose its significance through discussion. I look forward to writing a second piece after that.
Also, while the graphic design clearly wanted be subversive in the spirit of Dada, I really wanted to spit on the supid red and green explanatory texts. I think we have to accept that Dada has been commodified and intellectualised. But that of course is a whole other article.
Also, my work was the best on the show.
posted by Robert Sloon at 2:34 PM
14 Comments:
who the hell is on this show? there is no list as far as i can see? for example who is this artist called "among others"? personally i think the lolcat bible project is the best work mr sloon. (regardless of whether it is 'really' on the show or not...ahh the blissful freedom of cyberspace and willful ignorance).
best review of 2010 not
Important, yes. Most important, perhaps. Or maybe not. It strikes me as too partial to offer a full account of things. The opening room is too cluttered and consequentially lacks clarity. The exhibition is really two shows presented under one banner. The SA component, particularly in the room where your work is, seems unedited and doesn’t really communicate as much as the rooms with the journals, Possession Arts and Boshoff stuff. Also, Roger’s central premise of exploring the reciprocity of influence is almost absent in the Dada show. But it is, to borrow from Dave Southwood’s vernacular, tit. I think it is and will be remembered as a signal show.
Signaling what? Our reliance on a eurocentric discourse and the perpetual search to find and impose meaning that is nevertheless informed externally...
In the context of a museum dada loses its bite, the potential power of critique that the works once had is diminished under a ornamentalising frame that is at best sentimental.
Good, some discussion. Matthew, is "our reliance on a Eurocentric discourse etc" really the only way we have to read this show? Must we be perpetually stuck in this loop?
If we are anxious about external impositions of meaning (assuming you refer to western historical/discursive frameworks), what could be internal ways of finding meaning? And more importantly, how do we enact these so that we don't remain in the inward-looking, provincial artworld we currently occupy, where Capetonians are unaware of the contemporary histories of Joburg art and vice versa? Not to mention the rest of the towns and cities of SA that remain, for the most part, off the discursive map. And that, as a consequence, our art history remains a footnote to that of the rest of the world.
I'm certainly looking for these 'internally' informed ways of looking and thinking. And should I find some, the very last thing I would want to do is impose them on anything.
I also want to acknowledge the partial truth in your last point, but this is something not particular to Dada. What you say is pretty self-evident and with respect, rather parochial. Have the works lost their power to critique? Is nostalgia and sentimentality the only effect of showing works from the 20th century? I don't think so.
Sean, I take your point about the fullness of the opening room. Of course there were many conditions informing those decisions. And I am certainly interested in your 'two shows' comment. Do you mean to say the show itself is partial, or Sloon's review?
Keep a look out for symposium details. A catalogue will follow - AFTER the show to make use of such discussions (and hopefully a slew of others to follow)
Sean = No Tea. One Sugar
Matthew = Two Teas, One Enema
Kathryn = One Tea, One Raincheck
okay okay, i agree with you Kathryn that i pulled the 'reliance on a eurocentric discourse' card too hastily. but i just want to share with you whats been bothering me recently (please help me out here).
i've been reading Enwezors latest essay in Bourriauds altermodern catalogue: modernism and post-colonial ambivalence.
there he makes the distinction between 'grand' modernity and 'petit' modernity which is predicated on the 'mutability' of modernity.
here he quotes Dipesh Charakabarty (excuse the spelling - its late) on the hetero-temporal nature of modernity that is subject to the epistemic specificties of its given locale.
but here's the thing, it is still a mimetic function albeit recontextualised. i confess i didn't look at the works in the catalogue, but it feels like a global discourse that just subsumes rather than genuinely legitimates.
so ja, two shows. inward looking is important, and the thing is how do we measure ourselves to a discourse which serves as an empirical point of reference. the cpt/jhb thing is old. people must wake up. the show does an absolutely awesome job at being comprehensive.
but i do believe that when measured against such an idiomatic framework potential critique is lost because of the ornamentalising aspect behind objects that sits as productive points of consumption due to the comprehendability (read mutability) of an already existing zone of definition.
i've said to much. maybe im confused. im from a small town. when i first learnt about dada it made me believe in art again. it made me believe through the possibility of its own negation.
that's what i think we need to constantly ask ourselves.
and mona, i'll take rooibos.
dada in a museum (which is kinda what iziko is) is no more of a contradiction than a rooibos enema. Point is, is this useful? Does it do something?
I thought it was an interesting show.
I would have thought it was accepted that the relics ( and history) of dada are NOT dada. Is that a problem?
There are a range of useful experiences between the pilot flying into WTC on 9/11, and reading about it on Wiki (including being in the building, or imagining oneself in there)
There are also all then debates around an event like this. Why, what, etc.
I can't see matthew's pee for all the froth on top of his glass.
matthew just a basic question - is enwezor not also guilty of imposing 'external' frameworks in your reading of the matter?
And regarding mimesis (this is a long reply so have split it up)
mimesis has been the artist's enemy since time immemorial - but it too is a somewhat ambivalent enemy. one need only think about the notion of mimicry as elaborated by bhabha or even as it operates in the 'natural world' - that is to say mimicry may easily become a form of camouflage. here much of the early african modernists work capitalized on this ambivalence and more recently someone like yinka shonibare really exploited the close knit relationship between these values (see particularly the writings of oguibe on this subject). but in the case of bhabha (and spivak one may add) there remains a relative "...incuriosity about the enabling socioeconomic and political institutions and other forms of social praxis..." (Benita Parry) that ultimately does not wish to engage with the possibility of 'another knowledge'. according to parry this approach contends itself with placing incediary devices within already existing eurocentric structures of thought.
this i suspect is what really grates (not the fact that we end up miming others, which we all invariably do): that the forms of mimicry that we are subject to seem to collapse, to flatten out, to replicate only as replication and/or as response and not as 'origination' (as the origin of another knowledge, world view etc). but, and this seems more or less the point, it constitutes a difference in approach to what we make or have made. i say this with great care and after having run the gauntlet of an art education in sa where we are excellent at taking things apart but overtly critical/ suspicious about the prospect of making, of building something new (in academic terms, of advancing the field of knowledge). for example, think about your immediate response to the topic. and no i am not being mean, i think you have a point (but not by way of what you said initially - your later comments seem frustrated in a very interesting, and i would argue actually productive manner).
what i am saying is that we frame things in a very particular manner and somehow, with the framing device(s) that we have at our disposal, it also leads to a kind of amnesia. or stated somewhat more dramatically, it leads to a form of 'self-erasure' that obliterates the possibility of reading our approach to knowledge as A cultural framework (and not merely as critique - a bomb in someone else's house). to make this more clear think about architecture: in the west the window is the predominant frame whereas for the japanese the screen dominates. for the aboriginal people of australia the notion of the songline acts as framing device. what is the equivalent of that in our cultural context? perhaps there is no single answer but it does pose a necessary difficulty: critique is never just critique, it derives from a basic need to frame the earth, to draw out something like a form of humanized space where, in turn, something like meaning may then momentarily be distilled from the chaos that surrounds us (elizabeth grosz has written on this in much detail in her newest publication). and, in order for that to happen, we have to build a frame (even if as i suspect our framework is predominantly defined by the values appropriation and accordingly of artifice).
ultimately we have to consider what kind of knowledge this frame advances about the world and ourselves; what does it bring to the table (for it does bring something to the table even, and especially if we cannot immediately see it)?
now whatever one may say about bhabha or spivak, their work has already gleaned the possibility of other forms of knowledge but, in the ongoing polemic that is the ceaseless deconstruction of the west and its (post)colonial legacy, it has almost become orthodoxy to ignore the latter. there could be many reasons for this (the chip on our shoulder, the visceral realities of neo/colonialism, blatant artistic/ careerist opportunism etc) but until we consider what framework we have built (even if by appropriation, mimesis and theft - see kristeva and the notion of l'ecriture feminine particularly on the latter) we will continuously view ourselves as the second party in a very one sided conversation...where we keep erasing ourselves only to find they are still hanging about whenever we reappear.
i am not saying this exhibition succeeds in this regard (i will probably not see it) but in a contextual dynamics predominantly informed by values of framing, theft (read 'appropriation'...ha ha) and chance/ chaos, there seems to me ample room for this kind of nuanced discussion. put bluntly dada is quite an interesting metaphor for contemporary sa, its art and the frames through which we as subjects relate to the world(think about Dada's development from the initial acts of appropriation to its subsequent political usage by people like Johan Heartfield). of course then the discussion must also be predicated on what the works say about us, our frameworks and the various forms of subjectivity advanced thereby (as opposed to it becoming just another exercise in postcolonial critique 101). i am not against the latter, but in my mind it is just not the most important or interesting aspect of the discussion that could be had in relation to the exhibition.
ultimately this also depends on how the show is formally and conceptually framed (damn that weak pun!). so far there has been very little reading material on it and this could b interpreted as the curators being a little bit chicken shit (err... sorry katherine, roger). moreover the existing press release just toes the line of dada being an influence on our resistance strategies (sean's criticism seems to concur at least partially with this point although my focus is not about how we influenced european dada but rather how we advanced something about our own relationship to the world )...leading me back to the point i made earlier about mimicry as flattening out.
yes indeed mona: what does the show do?
After reading the text by Enwezor i lost faith and i think this is what i was trying to gesture towards.
The thing is that the reliance on modernity comes through its mutability - the ability for it to be spoken and translated into and by previously colonised cultures - thereby becoming that a mere mimetic function of an established system of knowledge, which as johan obsevres flattens out...
Enwezor argues that this a product of globalisation, but to me this euthanases the artists potential of looking in, because before this happens they are constantly looking out first.
maybe we have internalised the systems of a global discursive history to the extent that this is no longer a fully conscious act.
as much as i might be a part of this i dont want to be. i speak in a language that comes from outside, and i speak of a history that cannot be inculcated into national borders, maybe i'm guilty of that, but i also don't want to use that to labor the point of making sense of where i am now. our history is limited. Our - a difficult word vis-a-vis its inclusive tendencies. But (we) try to anyway.
as i said dada made me believe in art by the possibility of its own negation. south african art (again a weak signifier) to me has never achieved that, it has never so radically questioned itself to the point of denial.
Maybe in a few instances seen in this show it has. but the record of that attempted erasure gives it the ornamentalising inscription of an archive.
so maybe i can propose the question in light of dada; what is the function of an archive of erasure and what affect does this reinscription serve? more importantly, what are the underling agendas of the construction of such an archive so carefully tailored towards localising the global and globalising the local.
How comprehensive would an 'archive of erasure' have to be? Is it fair and sensible to refer in such overwrought 'mimetic' language to this small sampler from the available residue of dada?
jesus
I love the ‘fullness’ of the first room because it speaks of the Dada legacy to scream out ;to fill;to erase space.The typical white space clean cube is not suitable for any screaming .Resistance,repression and violence is a full action-no emptiness resides there.
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