Luminol is a chemical sometimes used in crime scenes to detect blood. When exposed to an oxidizing agent, in this instance the iron in blood, luminol exhibits chemiluminescence, a blue glow in the dark for approximately 30 seconds. A remarkable forensic tool, but seldom used as it tends to destroy the evidence it is exposing.

A similar process is at work in Kathryn Smith's In Camera, which opened last night at Goodman Cape Town. The major portion of the work was painted in UV inks on paper, invisible to the naked eye. At random intervals the lights shut down, after a few seconds of cloying pitch black UV lights switched on to reveal the paper not blank after all but covered in eerily glowing images. However, if after watching too much CSI or Medical Detectives one was expecting to be confronted by the distinctive blood splatters of a slit throat (left handed) or at least a ghostly smeary handprint one would be well disappointed. Although clearly referencing this language, what is revealed is a little more horrifying, but not in the guts. What is revealed, painted accurately with the obscuring half-tone patterns of newsprint, are portraits and landscapes, left unexplained. Of course we are familiar with the language of victimhood from the media, and instinctively know that these geeky teenagers and bland landscapes are the sites of horrific violence. This realisation still isn't what makes the images horrible. Instead, it is the fact that the process of taking the images and showing them, of taking the reality, converting it to image, being printed then found and converted into art, has drained them of anything frightening at all. They are bland, sapped of their strength. If they effect me it is on an intellectual level, the human response of compassion and fear is gone. Like the luminol, what is shown is destroyed.

Outside of the main UV-lit room sat a series of colour photographs entitled Sad Sketches. Anyone familiar with the Da Vinci Code, will recognise the scene where Robert Langdon finds hidden clues in the paintings using a black light torch. Similarly, in these works, photographs of what one assumes are crime scenes, reveal text and images when one loans the black light torch from the gallery.
It is my theory that the Da Vinci Code became so popular because it affirms the world is a big conspiracy. With the onset of the information age, when we are faced by many signs and much data, some hidden and some exposed, which is largely incomprehensible, we try and pick out some meaning from it, try to piece it all together into a coherent narrative. I believe it a human impulse, to make stories. A conspiracy is the most direct and simplest way of putting it all together. And we love the thrill of solving the clues.
In Camera will be a popular show because it, like the Da Vinci Code, shows us clues, hidden meanings and secrets, which we desperately will try and piece together and that's fun. But unlike the Da Vinci Code, there will be no easy bloodline solution, no conspiracy, instead we are just faced with the bleakness, and bland violence, of the world around us. And that's why it won't sell millions.

Labels: Kathryn Smith

In Camera Kathryn Smith
Opening Saturday 12 January at 18h00
Exhibition closes Saturday 2 February 2008
Artist, author, editor, curator, collaborator extraordinaire and currently senior lecturer in the Department of Art at Stellenbosch University, Kathryn Smith has established a reputation as an artist with a fascination for forensic investigation and an interest in crimes of passion and the rhetoric of evil.

In June 2007 Smith was amongst 6 international artists and a critic invited to participate in the residency program, exhibition and presentation at the iCommons Summit in Dubrovnik, Croatia, for which they produced and workshoped both physical and virtual work engaging with fair use, copyright, re-mixing, piracy and/or collaboration.

In camera (‘in private’ or ‘in secret’) refers to legal testimony heard in private chambers instead of in open court, usually when reliving the experience of a violent and traumatic event through verbal narration would be aggravated by having to do this in public.

For her first solo exhibition in Cape Town since ‘Euphemism’, the Standard Bank Young Artist Award exhibition at Iziko South African National Gallery in 2005, Smith sets up a controlled, immersive environment of light, sound, drawing and photography. Material for the drawings was sourced from a range of print and online media and processed so as to blur the distinction between the handmade and the mass-produced. The portrait subjects are the victims and perpetrators of violent acts, the circumstances of which remain almost incomprehensible in their extremity, even if the facts informing tabloid revelations of these cruel private desires are known. There is a particular focus on violence done to, and by, children.

Smith states: "I am particularly interested in how, through repetitive media circulation, certain photographic images get detached from their subjects and the representation of a person becomes emblematic of ‘victimhood’, ‘the missing’, ‘monstrosity’ or ‘evil’. This kind of rhetoric functions as a means to situate perpetrators of violence outside the realm of human behaviour and does not allow us to dwell on the particular human and social circumstances of each violent interaction."

The drawings are done with brush, paper, acrylic and ultraviolet-sensitive inks invisible to the naked eye. The lighting design, set to a computerized timing schedule creating apparently random intermittent phases of blacklight exposure, complete darkness and ambient light, inverts the camera’s function of an open shutter where a light-sensitive surface is exposed, and a dark state where nothing is captured nor visible.

In setting up a relationship between the spectrum and the spectral, disruption, revelation and obfuscation, In Camera is a project about ghosts and mental afterimages, an attempt to reclaim that which eludes cognitive and emotional capture and retention.

Labels: Goodman Gallery, Kathryn Smith, listings

Barend de Wet's quiescent MoCA, AKA Museum of Temporary Art, has been taken on by Christian Nerf and Kathryn Smith. Expect exhibitions, publications, experiments and awards.

Labels: Barend de Wet, Christian Nerf, Kathryn Smith, MoCA

Sorry for the slowness of posts this week I'm not only a useless artist wanker, but also have a real job, which occasionally gets in the way, along with the odd hangover that debilitates my desire to write. I've been meaning to put up a review of One Million and Fourty Four Years (and Sixty Three Days) for a little while, but my copy fell apart at the spine, and I was too depressed to continue (at least the ISBN was easy to find: 978-0-620-38259-5). I hear rumour that a whole bunch of the books were sent back to the printer to be rebound in hardcover, so if you bought a crappy-spined copy like me, sorry, you were too eager, and you know what they say about the early worm.
However, and all that aside, Kathryn Smith did a good job of putting the content together, with a lot of interesting input from a variety of interesting people. Essentially, the book puts forward the question: Is the avant-garde still a viable/tenable notion in the current contemporary moment? You can read Zachary Yorke's review on Artthrob here as he is more capable of wading through a Colin Richards piece than I am. Some of my favourites were the more visual submissions, such as Gustavo Artigas' Spontaneous Human Combustion 1 where the artist burst into flames during a talk about Mexican artists and the avant-garde (see his website here, it's worth a look. You can also see a video of the SHC piece and some other awesome works) and Kristofer Paetau's Artforum Accident where the artist vomits at an art fair (his site here). The local Avant Car Guard sent some pictures which were also pretty funny. The text pieces were in a variety of styles, some short and aggressive, some long and dry, and some plain fascinating. My personal favourite was Stacy Hardy's Everyone Hates Me Because I'm Nerdy and White, an unsettling journey featuring Ed Young (partially fictionalised) and a blowjob. Other pieces that took a more academic or more formal stance were also enlightening, such as the contributions by Robert Storr, Bettina Malcomess, Liam Gillick, Sean o'Toole and others. I think the book is vital reading, not only because of it's diverse content, but also because it is an example of where books on art in South Africa should be going... not just monographs and surveys of South African art, but rather questions being asked and answered on valuable topics, that include a South African focus but refuse to be so insular.

Books available at Baobab Books, Clarke's Books both on Long Street, Cape Town. SMAC gallery in Stellenbosch has copies too, and I imagine you could order from them if Long Street is off your tramping grounds.

Labels: art, avant-garde, book review, Kathryn Smith, review, South Africa