FLASH, AHA
Fast cars, women, cash and cocktails: in Cape Town, where a sense of humour can be a seriously rare commodity, a small group of artists is doggedly working at bringing a light touch to the process of art production. Loosely grouped around the name "Flash" they seek to embrace a hedonistic lifestyle while still being primarily committed to making art. Celebrity, media manipulation and a well-developed sense of their own importance all combine in a heady cocktail of work, pleasure, violence and an irreverent view of life.
The Flash "group" made a considerable splash in January 2004 with a trio of exhibitions, opening on consecutive Wednesday nights, which on the surface seemed to be very different. Cameron Platter's The Love is Approaching (Joao Ferreira Gallery), Ed Young's Asshole (Bell-Roberts Gallery) and Vuyisa Nyamende's Japan (Bell-Roberts Gallery) each presented a view of contemporary art practice, media commentary and engagement with popular culture.
Platter's exhibition consisted of a series of five large-scale drawings, accompanied by an animated video and a series of prints, drawn from stills of the video. Platter's technique is to make cartoon-like drawings using a crude digital drawing program and then to precisely translate these computer-generated images onto vast sheets of paper by means of thickly layered pencil crayon. In the artist's own words he is inspired and influenced by "desert islands, palm trees, sharks, fast cars, women, cash, politicians, cocktails, dark and stormy nights, Frank Sinatra, leopards, James Bond, zebras in spaceships, landscapes, African woodcut artists, friends, strangers in the night, and approaching love: all themes central to life in contemporary South Africa".
The video that accompanied the exhibition on two giant wall projections presented five narrative stories that "explained" the drawings. Funny, violent and slightly self-mocking, they encapsulated all the fundamental elements of Flash.
Young's Asshole, like most of the artist's exhibitions, has been the subject of much discussion and speculation. The third in a series of "one night" art exhibitions, which began with Bruce Gordon in March 2003 at Iziko: South African National Gallery (reviewed in Art South Africa Vol 1 No 4) and was followed by Muse (an exhibition of an all-female string quartet of the same name) later that year, presented the public with another opportunity to drink copious quantities of alcohol and generally socialise. Essentially Young's formula is to create a well-publicised event and supplement it with a small but elegant catalogue, illustrated with photographs of contextual material and accompanied by an over-the-top text written by an art theorist. The size and format of each catalogue (with the title always printed in transparent varnish on the cover) references the shape and size of the English translation of Postproduction by the influential French art theorist Nicholas Bourriaud.
Asshole consisted of a small group of elements: topless bar ladies hired from Teazers, the strip-bar near to Bell-Roberts Gallery; 50 cases of Heineken beer; galvanised tubs filled with ice and beer; trestle tables laden with buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken; some open packs of Camel cigarettes in a demarcated "VIP" smoking area; three plasma screens simultaneously playing Outkast's video Hey Ya, supposedly stolen from MTV or the internet; a framed print that comprised the word "asshole" written in very small letters in the bottom left-hand corner of the otherwise blank sheet of paper and a wall painting that looked like a graffito of the title of the show. While critics complained that there was no "real work" on show, the crowd had a fabulous party (estimated attendance was 800, almost unheard of for a Cape Town commercial gallery show) and the astute observer could see that Young had presented one work in each of the codified disciplines of contemporary art production: painting (the wall piece); performance (the strippers); print media (the print); sculpture (the KFC, Heineken and Camels) and new media (the plasma screens). Needless to say the whole work served as an installation.
Nyamende's Japan saw the artist use his technique of collage in a typically zany and humorous way. Consisting of prints and works made directly onto the walls of the gallery, Nyamende presented his quirky, madcap view of the world by means of juxtaposing images sourced from magazines and newspapers tied together with small handwritten slips of paper that bring a narrative structure to the work. For Japan Nyamende also presented a video made in a similar way: in this case various television programmes were edited together in a rough, seemingly haphazard sequence. The resulting video was played on a small monitor, the artist making no attempt to clean up the snow, bad reception and other "flaws" in the recordings.
By using the land of the rising sun as the title of his show, Nyamende evokes the image of the artist ascendant. His self-confidence in his abilities and his assurance of his own imminent fame can be seen in the analogy indicated by the word "Japan". Japan also evokes notions of technological invention and deep spirituality. Nyamende is profoundly interested in Asian systems of thought, yoga, meditation and the concept of physical bodily transformation by means of mind control. Part of his larger project is to transform his slight frame by growing several inches, enlarging his penis and learning to levitate, all by means of deep understanding.
The interconnectedness of the artists’ work was demonstrated by Nyamende making a large collage around Young’s in situ "Asshole" painting, in which he mocked all his friends, speculating which one was the biggest asshole of the lot. Dan Halter, a Swiss-Zimbabwean artist loosely associated with the Flash crowd, won in the end, and rumour has it that one well-known artist was furious at being mentioned in the text as an asshole. The Flash crew work hard at trying to inculcate a sense of humour in a frequently recalcitrant and complacent art crowd.
In essence all three exhibitions shared this: they engaged with the notions of fun and play. The seeming "easiness" of the work, frequently invoked by critics, belies the artists' deep commitment to a phenomenal productivity. Platter's "simple" drawings take enormous time to produce. Pencil crayon is laboriously applied, layer after layer, with exact reference to a projected image drawn from the original digital source. Platter also frequently rejects work that does not convey the feeling he wishes to evoke. He will remake a work over and over again, even though the image on the paper itself seems indistinguishable visually from the previous, rejected version. Nyamende's collages, supposedly quickly made and simply affixed directly to the wall, are the result of hundreds of hours of sourcing and combining found visual material. For Japan he handmade 1 000 invitations, each one bearing a small image cut out from a magazine. For Young’s events, so seemingly minimal, the artist becomes an events planner, media company and logistics expert. Each event is complex and, in the case of the two most recent exhibitions, expensive. The seemingly careless spray-paint graffito on the wall was in fact an exact replica of an image created for the Art South Africa advertisement for the show, painstakingly painted using an airbrush by an expert specifically hired to produce it.
As a phenomenon Flash goes back to an event concocted by Nyamende and Platter while still students at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. They took one of their collaborative paintings and sent out press statements and distributed flyers stating that the work had been stolen, offering a large cash reward for its safe return. To this day they maintain that the work was indeed stolen and no one has seen the painting since. As a result they got some newspaper coverage and general discussion going about the missing masterpiece. The bug bit and celebrity and media hype for its own sake became a major feature of the artists' production.
Young insists that he is not a member of Flash, despite all appearances to the contrary: this is typical of his difficult and contrary nature. Nyamende has been reported as acknowledging that he "severed his ties with conventional reality a long time ago", something that those who know him will not dispute for a moment. Few who were around at the time would forget Nyamende's Flash stunt that saw him painting a long continuous red stripe along the length of the frontage on Long Street: an artist intervention that landed him in jail for the night. Platter carries a carefully cultivated veneer of sleaze over his natural charm and urbane manner.
Platter and Nyamende began collaborating regularly while still at art school and lived in the same house (owned by artist Bridget Baker) for a while. Visitors to the duo's abode recall knife fights, death threats and debauched living. It was at this time that Galerie Puta was launched. With a curatorial and management staff comprising Platter, Young and myself, the gallery was established as a nonspace-specific commercial gallery that provided an opportunity for established as well as emerging artists to exhibit together. Baker unintentionally gave the preferred moniker for the loose accumulation of friends and hangers-on that emerged out of the weekly preparation meetings prior to the first Puta event: "the cronies". The name Galerie Puta (gallery of the prostitute) was a reference to the perceived status of younger, non-established artists as well as the profession of many who walk the streets of Green Point, where Platter and Nyamende were living at the time.
The first exhibition, Meeting: Art in the Water Closet, was held on May 17 2003. The title is an example of the deliberate toying with the art world and the media that characterizes so much of Flash production. Originally the exhibition had no name and none was indicated on the flyers advertising it. Sean O’Toole, editor of ArtThrob.co.za, headed his listing for the exhibition "Meeting: Art in the Water Closet". The curatorial team simply accepted it and used the name in further publicity. The event was characterised by a fabulous party, martinis made by Platter, and original work firmly located in international contemporary practice. Nyamende made a small sculpture of a man in soap, Young's work was to make no work for the show (in an edition of five), and artists as varied as Sue Williamson, Kathryn Smith, Bridget Baker, James Webb and Abrie Fourie exhibited.
Puta's next major event was participating in Christian Nerf's Art as Usual residency programme at Johannesburg Art Gallery. Platter and myself muscled in on an invitation extended to Young, and set out to play a game of Risk for 24 hours non-stop while drinking excessive quantities of alcohol. Well-wishers dropped in and played along during the period which saw the walls of the space littered with obscene and scurrilous graffiti. After exactly 24 hours the trio retreated without another word, leaving behind dozens of empty liquor bottles, ashtrays filled to overflowing with cigarette stompies, at least one broken chair, considerable mess and a rather unpleasant smell in the air.
The strange, almost unclassified nature of the work emanating from the group may also be seen in Galerie Puta’s Secret Exhibition. This was the second formal exhibition of the gallery and consisted of an exhibition that no one was invited to, held at a secret location on the night of the birthday party of Estelle Jacobs, AVA director and a leading light in Cape Town's art scene. By hosting such a show on the one night when the art elite would all be somewhere else, and by attending the birthday party themselves, the curators could be seen to be commenting on the significance of the social element in the construction of artistic identity in South Africa.
Nyamende, Platter and Young all unabashedly seek media attention and flirt with it. They all make sure that they are well represented on radio and television. Asshole made prime-time news (as did Bruce Gordon before it) and Nyamende was the subject of a recent prime-time television insert in a magazine programme. The Flash cronies were also interviewed for TV, playing cards at the fashionable L/B's above Jo'burg bar on Long Street, drinking sparkling wine with wads of cash on the table: "This is what we do at our meetings," Platter declared as he quaffed his wine.
Their rapid fame, irreverence, lack of respect for the holy cows of the art establishment and seemingly "easy" art have earned them not a few enemies and critics. With work that is sometimes difficult for conservatively trained art connoisseurs to understand and engage with, they unapologetically locate their art as specifically South African while referencing international practice. Criticisms that "it has all been done before" (usually applied to Young and a charge he does not deny) or “it’s sloppy” simply miss the point and indicate a refusal to engage with a much larger project: the young artist making his own way through a tough and stratified art circuit, while having a whale of a time doing it.
Just before completing this piece I was at a free concert in Greenmarket Square. Platter, Halter and Nyamende were standing with me (Young had grumpily gone off to find some KFC, irritating everyone). The magnetic stage presence of Brenda Fassie had us all riveted. She was joking about rumours about her life, defying all rules by publicly endorsing her political party of choice and generally behaving in a fabulously Flash manner. "This is the kind of woman we need to collaborate with for Flash," Nyamende observed. "She's far Flasher than all of us put together and then some," I replied. Nyamende nodded his agreement. I think my observation was accurate but time itself will have to tell how long it takes for them to catch up with the Princess of Pop.
Andrew Lamprecht
Extract from: Lamprecht, Andrew. “Flash, Aha.” Art South Africa, Vol 02, Issue 03, Autumn, 2004,Page 48
