EDGE OF SILENCE. A group exhibition. At the Goodman Gallery until Saturday. DANNY SHORKEND reviews
A STRANGE serenity looms at this exhibition. As if one cannot quite string the works together into an integrated thematic whole, such that there is an elusive quality to this show. Yet at the same time, there is an intellectual calm that pervades the work, a stirring of the imagination that transports one to a clear, almost utopian world.
In other words, my impression is that although one cannot easily specify the continuity between the works, at the same time there is an aura of clarity, of an “other” that is there, but cannot quite be grasped, like the mystery of sleep, silence and the unconscious.
Thus considered, the title edge of silence is useful and suggests a borderline, that an impasse has been reached. Metaphorically rich, the “edge” exists only as a thought-construct or an imaginative concoction. Beyond that is noise or possibly intelligible words or even music. But visual arts exist on that very “edge”, a nomadic life between silent perceptual awareness and the cacophony of sound, the tumult of what can be said and associated meanings.
The result: a creative use of materials and aesthetic sensibility that points to thought – silence – and perceptual redundancy – that which is mechanical and beyond articulated comprehensibility.
There are some fascinating works on display. Kendell Geers two OTR truck tyres and paint, entitled songs of innocence and of experience, explore and ‘reappropriates’ such mundane objects into a quasi-mystical beauty, transforming mundane objects in the process.
This sense of formal beauty that is at the same time clinical and minimalist is itself iterated in a number of works such as Liza Lou’s woven glass beads on linen that immediately attracts, its gold shimmer drawing the viewer in. And once there, one is aware of the repetitive beadwork, thoughts that do and undo as consciousness – perhaps – moves from wakefulness into the world of sleep.
Or on a another level: an ode to art where meaning is reduced to formal beauty proving art and beauty ineffectual as a transformative act in society.
In other words: process and craft overshadows singular, definite meanings and art’s capacity to effect rather than simply reflect society at a given point in space and time.
This quandary is manifest in other works: Hank Willis Thomas’s Monochrome II diptych lenticular; Jeremy Wafer’s measure, an incantation of Brancusi’s endless column; Gerald Machona’s Monolith, a door that neither opens nor closes, a door separated from surrounding wall fixtures and Kapwani Kiwanga’s organ film performance, wherein a repetitive act seems to go no-where, say nothing and is impervious to human expression.
There is a sense that such works (and others) proffer that one cannot say anything is true as such, only tautological propositions, in which case meaning is redundant.
In other words: language only has sense within the self-enclosed system of a particular language and thus one might take a pragmatic Wittgensteinian approach and claim that the meaning of a word is given in its use within a particular game, a “form of life”.
In this respect, Broomberg and Chanarin’s mask series (as I like to call it) and Lorna Simpson’s 15 mouths suggest that communication is but in limbo, fragmentary, setting up a dislocation between what is seen and what is heard.
As Wittgenstein said: “Whereof one cannot speak one must remain silent”. In such terms, it is unclear whether a particular language is in use – we are at the edge of silence.
There are numerous thought provoking works on offer: Kentridge’s sleeping on glass series, a series of etchings where text is “broken” with drawings; Alfredo Jaar’s other people think lightbox and Mounir Fatmi’s quirky G-d is dead reference to Nietzsche with the reversal word-play or deep meaning recant “Nietzsche is dead by G-d”, as it were.
All in all, there is a clinical minimalism to the show, but with enough conceptual depth that such minimalism need not be simply formal redundancy, or tautological, or pattern for the sake of pattern, the mere never-ending repetition of sounds, even words.
Rather, there is indeed an entry into silence, that space that holds all sound, the very basis for language so that in the end, the “sound and fury” need not signify nothing.
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