Subjective state: recently on view in New York, a two-venue exhibition of contemporary art from South Africa conveyed a refreshing cultural openness 10 years after the demise of apartheid

Art in America, Feb, 2005 by Faye Hirsch

A decade after South Africa held its first democratic elections in 1994, exhibitions in Europe and the U.S. marked the anniversary by taking stock of the country's contemporary art scene. "Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art," one such offering, was on view last fall in New York at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan and at the Museum for African Art in Queens; it presented 17 artists who were mostly new to American viewers. As the title suggests, the show labored a bit under thematic overkill; it was difficult to cogently recall the curatorial premise when viewing the works or to draw obvious connections among them. Yet the introduction of fresh, interesting material by artists of diverse backgrounds was welcome. Indeed, the exhibition showcased an increased openness in the South African art world, though the effort was not articulated as such. Some prickly problems of racial and economic accessibility that one senses when visiting the country's galleries and museums were nowhere in evidence.

Attempting to "bypass" the issue of cultural identity, as one of the five curators, Laurie Farrell of the Museum for African Art, writes in the catalogue, the selection turned to the personal. Yet identity as a theme popped up everywhere, as might be expected of a show that hinged on nationality. The broad challenges South African society faces--AIDS, crime and government corruption--occasionally arose, but the focus was more on apolitical approaches, many of them performance-based, that seek identity in subjective states of being.

Half of the artists in "Personal Affects" are in their 20s and 30s and have established themselves entirely in the post-apartheid era; with one exception, the rest are in their 40s yet seem to be likewise forging new careers. The artists showed works at both venues. At the cathedral, dwarfed by the giant interior, pieces were installed in chapels and niches, and one artist, Diane Victor, placed large, handsome drawings in the reredos behind the choir (a funky life of the Virgin, The Eight Mary's 2004, recalling Paula Rego in style). The cathedral setting offered a stark contrast to the museum, where the nondescript quarters were cramped (there were separate openings, with one-time performances, at each venue).

Steven Cohen, born in Johannesburg but living in France, is probably the most unsettling of the participating artists. A gay Jewish cross-dresser whose performances sometimes involve masochism, he is ghostly pale, with a delicate demeanor. At the museum, Cohen, nearly naked but for a corset and, around his arm, the sacred tefillin (worn in Jewish prayer), squeezed himself into the bowl of an oversize gumball machine where he probed himself with a laserscopic camera, projecting images of his insides onto a screen in an adjacent room (Free Jew is cheap at twice the price). This space was furnished with taxidermied African wildlife, framed tabloids blaring headlines, and various personal items. When we weren't seeing live Cohen, Nazi footage was screened; and a swastika adorned the metal flap over the gum dispenser.

At the cathedral, Cohen offered a version of his performance Chandelier, for which he dons an antique French candelabra, worn as a tutu lit up by electric bulbs, and absurdly high-heeled shoes that force him into an awkward, knock-kneed gait. In the original Chandelier (2002), as recorded in a video on display at the cathedral, Cohen attended the destruction of a squatters' community in Johannesburg--never a pleasant event anywhere, but especially charged in a nation with a history of forced resettlement. To a soundtrack of a cantor singing a Hebrew prayer and a constant tinkling that evokes the crystals in his garb (and, perhaps, Kristallnacht), Cohen is seen drifting through the settlement as an army of government workers demolishes the makeshift dwellings. The inhabitants are shouting at the workers but taunting Cohen as well. The moral ambiguity of his position becomes oddly moot in the context of his surreal, twinkling beauty illuminating the urban twilight. At the opening, the chandelier-clad Cohen was hoisted aloft in St. John's darkened nave, with the tinkling and the Hebrew prayer broadcast into the cathedral's echoing recesses.

Disturbing in a different way is Churchill Madikida's work, in which our discomfort is piqued by watching something that is normally hidden--a secret rite or an example of compulsive behavior. Madikida, who grew up in the Eastern Cape, presented a 2004 video, Skeletons in My Closet, at the cathedral. It consists of a morphing, digitized close-up of his red-stained hands rubbing each other, as if obsessively washing; a computer-tweaked Rorschach blot of sorts, the video image loops rapidly, with the abstracted, viscous-looking hands by turns suggesting livid sex organs and menacing plants. The monitor was rather bizarrely situated above a bust of the bloody Christ crowned by thorns. Though the sculpture belongs to the cathedral and was not officially part of Madikida's work, this placement brought out the video's fetishistic quality. At the museum, Madikida screened his 2003 video Struggles of the Heart, in which he is seen in a head shot, covered in chalk, continuously chewing and spitting out cornmeal paste (the action is looped). The work refers to an aspect of Xhosa circumcision ceremonies, but also to prohibitions about speaking of the rituals.