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

Two large, extravagant drums (Suka Africa Funduzi, 2004) by Samson Mudzunga, the oldest artist (age 66) in the show by a generation, are partly performance relics. Consecrated in a celebration in the northern province of Limpopo, where he was born and lives (unlike better-known South African artists such as Kendell Geers and Marlene Dumas, many of those in "Personal Affects" still reside in their homeland), the drums have hatches that allow the artist to crawl inside. The instruments are fancifully decorated with carvings, bulls' eyes and texts, and, according to the artist, represent his liberation from jail, an internment brought about by the false accusations of fellow villagers. Mudzunga emerges from the drums during performances like a butterfly from a chrysalis. The consecration ceremony was on view in a documentary video at the museum, and Mudzunga also performed at the cathedral. Though the connection was surely accidental, one could not help noting a morphic resonance between Cohen in the gum-machine bubble and Mudzunga in the drum, an inadvertent comment, perhaps, on the extremes to be found in contemporary South African culture.

Elsewhere in the cathedral, Minette Vari (born in Pretoria, outside Johannesburg, where she lives) showed a wall projection of her two-channel video The Calling (2003). In it, Vari plays a gargoyle come to life, costumed in a surreal assemblage and crawling along parapets above montaged views of various cities in which she has spent time--including Brussels and New York, as well as Johannesburg. Shot in black and white, the footage has an archaic, timeless quality that reflects the artist's interest in archetypes. Eventually she spits out an animated lizard, a reference to a folk tale about a sharp-tongued girl whose speech is transformed from words into reptiles. At a certain point the phrase, "O, Jerusalem, Golden City" streams across the sky in Latin. The artist says in the catalogue that she considers its use ironic, but one is tempted to laugh at its portentousness.

By comparison, Robin Rhode (who lives in Berlin) has a marvelously playful touch, which was evident as well in a concurrent solo show at Perry Rubenstein in Chelsea, his first in the U.S. [see review this issue]. Rhode's work usually involves urban street life in some form; at the museum, he showed Autonomous Drawing Project (2004), consisting of slides of an action in which he left small drawings on furniture discarded on New York City curbs, then photographed the assemblages. Intrigued by the phenomenon of cultures where people are so affluent that they throw away such useful goods, Rhode made drawings that were mainly instructional in nature, advising the finder of the furniture's potential functions, sometimes quite fanciful in conception. There's a message, to be sure, but whimsy triumphs over didacticism.

Mustafa Maluka, like Rhode born in Cape Town in 1976, erected a memorial in the cathedral to a rapper called Mr. Devious, who was recently murdered in the vast, crime-ridden ghetto of Cape Flats, where he lived. The memorial, which settled comfortably into the cathedral's commemorative decor, included a large graffiti mural depicting Devious, a glass case with various memorabilia (handwritten lyrics on ragged notebook paper, newspaper articles, etc.) and a video with clips of the rapper's raw, political performances. In earlier paintings (2002) at the museum, motifs borrowed from magazines--a raised black fist, a somber portrait--are iconically placed amid rollicking abstract forms suggesting graffiti tags. Containing a nostalgic strain of pan-Africanism, Maluka's paintings conjure the politically charged era of the Nigerian pop singer Fela Kuti (1938-1997), as well as the contemporary international hip-hop scene. particularly impressive in the show was the sculpture, for which artists used the cathedral setting to advantage. Doreen Southwood, for example, contributed The Swimmer (2004), a painted bronze, bathing-suit-clad girl (around a foot-and-a-half tall) with a Goberesque drain in her hip, poised on a diving board; its installation against the ecclesiastical backdrop served to enhance its surreal quality. Jane Alexander, who lives and teaches in Cape Town, populated another chapel with her signature life-size dewy-eyed creatures with human torsos and bestial faces and limbs ("The sacrifices of God are a troubled spirit," 2002-04). She fashions them out of reinforced plaster painted in oil to uncannily realistic effect, and dresses them in clothing and animal skins, antlers and other hybridous trappings. An unclassifiable exoticism is pervasive, and a vulnerability, as if they are the last of their species. One has a bird's head, clawed feet and an armless torso; another, lambs' ears and no mouth. It was altogether a Boschian gathering. Perhaps as a moralizing subtext, Alexander piped in a recording of a monastic chant of Psalm 51, a prayer for the remission of sins.