Defining art and finding where it lives
WE ARE all imagemakers now. Videos, GIFs and memes — almost everyone has the technology and the appetite to create them.
The traditional genres are also available at the touch of a button: still life (this-is-what-I’m-eating photos constitute the most common subgenre), landscape (this is where I am on holiday) and portraiture (mostly kids and cats).
Above all, we specialise in selfportraits. Add a filter, a caption, perhaps a hashtagged artist’s statement, and voila!
Where does this leave visual artists who want to work in a medium other than smartphone photography? What does it mean to be a painter in the age of the selfie? Do we need to shift our assumptions of what it is to “portray” a person?
Such questions lie behind #selfie, a group painting exhibition curated by Teresa Lizamore (at Lizamore & Associates, 155 Jan Smuts Avenue Parkwood, until September 23).
Some of the artists’ responses to these questions are earnest, even slightly despairing; others adopt a wry, ironic response or simply poke fun at our collective narcissism.
Several of the works reproduce familiar selfie poses and facial expressions, testing the claim that a change in medium (the texture and coloration of an image painted on canvas compared to the virtual and screen-based image) and method (the painter’s skill and patience as opposed to the photographic impulse) can invest otherwise banal subjects with significance.
By contrast, there are a handful of pieces that reject mimesis or realism, choosing instead to disrupt the conventions of the selfie through fragmentation or abstraction.
Each artist has added a few lines of text below their painting. These range from Instagram-imitating hashtags and concise quotations that hint at theoretical critiques of image consumption in the digital age, to doleful and ponderous reflections on the nature of identity, subjectivity and existence.
It is notable that the latter type of textual supplement tends to detract from the image, which in most cases is visually arresting or presents a pleasing puzzle to the viewer and doesn’t need the adjunct verbal angst.
Yet this phenomenon is in itself thought-provoking. Is the problem here that the selfie is — or must, by definition, be — a superficial mode of representation?
In other words, while a selfie may be analysed or deconstructed and may invite speculation, it presents a basic philosophical barrier: it is what it is, and that’s usually not much. You can’t go “deep” in response to a selfie.
The differences between smartphone selfies and carefully constructed painted portraits also relate to consumption and that old saw of the arts world, “accessibility”.
This has implications, of course, for the role of the gallery and other formal arts institutions — a role that is frequently brought into question, increasingly by artists themselves.
So it is felicitous that, across the road from #selfie, Chad Cordeiro and Nathaniel Sheppard’s print exhibition Kwaal-ity Control is concurrently on display at David Krut Projects.
Cordeiro and Sheppard’s title alludes to “the idea that every print needs to be quality controlled — to be perfect” but also hints at their dissatisfaction with the microeconomy of an industry in which a printer’s “labour” does not translate into “ownership” of the print.
Their collaborative drypoint series, The Birds and the Bees, seems in particular to engage in contestation over “the means of production”. The bees (apart from the queen bee) work hard all day long, but who gets the honey? And the various bird figures are either predators or scavengers, exercising power through violence.
The birds and bees appear to fit into a broader critique of labour dynamics and the operation of capital — in SA today, or in other corners of the world over the last two centuries, as some of the iconography suggests (the artists worked closely with William Kentridge to produce the large-scale woodcut Mantegna, and there are echoes in this exhibition of Kentridge’s preoccupation with the history and afterlives of Marxism).
I don’t think Cordeiro and Sheppard are insinuating that all gallerists are vultures, although no doubt many are. The David Krut stable, at any rate, is hardly an exploitative environment; if it were, a show like this would presumably not be possible.