Cutting-Edge Humour
Young conceptual artist is making waves with his playful approach in
which performance plays an important role.
In case you haven’t been following, here are a few highlights
from Simon Gush’s youthful career. In March 2005, he installed
four rotating ceiling fans in the Drill Hall in Jo’burg’s
inner city. The fans were mounted very low with the blades rotating just
above visitors’ heads.
Gush, a Wits Fine Art graduate, used fans again in a work shown last
year. The work entitled Perfect Lovers, a tribute to the deceased Cuban-American
artist Felix Gonzales-Torres, involved two fans installed dangerously
close to one another with their blades almost touching.
Earlier this year, shortly before departing for a two-year postgraduate
stint in Ghent, Belgium, Gush orchestrated another of his threateningly
funny action pieces.
For Three-Point Turn, Gush briefed a former minibus-taxi driver, Sam
Matentji, to do a stunt performance on Twist Street, just outside the
Drill Hall, across the road from one of the city’s most congested
taxi ranks. Driving a van christened Ihashi Lemohlophe (“white
horse” in Xhosa), Matentji did a three-point turn in front of the
gallery and drove headlong into oncoming traffic on the one-way.
In an e-mail conversation with Gush, in Chile at the time for a project,
I ask the 26-year-old about the Parking Gallery, a tiny basement project
space he founded on Pritchard Street. During its brief life it hosted,
among others, a quirky performance involving marathon runners – the
action was overseen by friend and sometimes collaborator, artist Dorothee
Kreutzfeldt.
“It was a conceptual response to a situation,” says Gush. “The
Parking Gallery, as separate to my own practice, was a backdrop to a conversation
I was quietly having with what was happening in Jo’burg: what kind
of work gets shown, how it is presented, how it is possible to do your
own thing without waiting for institutions to come and pick you up, and
just the need for diversity in the art scene.”
The South African scene is quite conservative, says Gush, his gallery
positioned as both implied critique and viable alternative. He credits
installation and logistics expert Bie Venter with playing an important
role in shaping his thinking. “I have often said I learnt ore from
working with Bie than I learnt in four years at Wits. That is not to
say Wits is bad, it is just that working professionally as a technician
gave me the chance to really see how people approach space in a general
sense.”
A brief period assisting renowned performance artist Marina Abromovic,
who in 2005 staged an action at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, was also
influential on his early practice. “Performance, although I would
never call my self a performance artist, is a major part of my thinking
around all of my work and always has been. It (Abramovic’s show)
was probably the singularly most influential show in terms of my practice
that I have worked on and, certainly after that, performance took on
a more explicit position in my work.”
A recent work exhibited at Michael Stevenson in Cape Town, highlights
Gush’s ongoing interest in performance. Titled 21 Gun Salute for
the Death of a Collector, the work is exactly what the name implies,
a chorus of 21 gunshots to mark the death of its owner. It owes a debt
to Gonzales-Torres, earlier this year the subject of a survey show at
the Venice Biennale. The exhibition included his famous paper stacks,
which invite audiences to remove single sheets of duplicate prints. “His
pieces are incredibly interesting in relation to the market,” says
Gush.
Although anyone can potentially own a facsimile of a Gonzales-Torres
work, legal of the work is distinguishable by a certificate.
Gush’s gun salute piece employs a similar tack, the promise of
a future action accompanied by a detailed legal document. He is careful
not to overstate the implied subversion of his action-based works, which
often lack any fixed commodity.
“Artworks that are openly critical of capitalism, for example the
work of Santaigo Sierra, are often rapidly absorbed into it,” he
says. “I would like it if there was a way of withholding something
in the work, so that there is a part that can’t be bought and sold.
And I don’t mean dematerialising the art object or any of those kinds
of strategies. We all know that concepts are regularly bought and sold”.
