_{^{Kai Lossgo and Anthea Moys in the performance art piece, Unsaid, ath the Johannesburg Art Gallery, 18 May 2008.}}

It was a rather odd experience to watch performance art performed at the Johannesburg Art Gallery on a balmy Sunday afternoon with the occasional burst of gunfire in the background as ethic violence raged around parts of Joburg.  Up from Cape Town were the winner and finalists in the Spier Contemporary Art Awards  2007 – the performance category which featured prominently on this year’s awards.  Various pieces have been staged around Wits University School of Arts and outside the Sandton Convention Centre.  I didn’t catch any of those but I did see two pieces on the last day at the JAG.

The first up was Unsaid by Kai Lossgot and Anthea Moys. In a short piece  barely four minutes long -  a domestic slapstick tinged with pathos – the two performers faced each other across the lip of the fountain. While water poured down the abyss below them; they spat streams of water at each other,  acting out the universal stages of a relationship, balanced on the edge of the fountain, the threat of break up and failure.  Anthea Moys in her grandmother’s vivid red dress; Kai Lossgot more enigmatic in a plain white shirt and grey pants.  They leaned away from each other and towards each other, held together in a force-field of love, or habit,  before exploding into confrontation and spitting.

The  afternoon featured the overall winner of the Spier Contemporary Art Award in 2007: Peter van Heerden’s Flowers for my Flesh, a perverse  interpretation of the  fairy tale in which van Heerden, naked except for pair of veldskoens and a floral kappie, acts the part of Sleeping Beauty  in a kind of bugger drag. He follows a trail of flowers across the Fountain and through the Gallery to his Prince Charming. His prince turns out to be a  paunchy lout  in a ragged old South Africa Tshirt who beats him before returning sulkily to his braai while cheesy Afrikaans pop music blares around the Gallery courtyard.

The sight of this beefy Afrikaaner man clambering around the Gallery fountain in his white kappie and iron harness provoked a wave of interest amongst the people relaxing in the park behind the green pallisade fence  that separates the space of art from the space of public recreation. Within a short time the entire population of the park was pressing against the fence to catch of glimpse of  van Heerden splashing through the water in search of his true love.

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Van Heerden’s performance was acted out with great gusto and physical risk-taking, from the provocation of his nakedness to his scrambling up the face of the fountain and his rope climbing; but it felt that he was performing the last rites of a cultural complaint whose time has passed. Exploding the ethnic pieties, the stranglehold of patriarchy and sentimental romance, in Afrikaaner culture,  no longer seems very relevant or very urgent.   There are new forms of ethnic consciousness which demand articulation. Perhaps by other artists with direct experience of these forms.  A few blocks below the Gallery in central Joburg and in other parts of the city, this new and more violent form of ethnic consciousness  seems to be emerging into the daylight of the South African psyche. Thousands of people have been displaced, while many have been attacked, injured and even killed by mobs waving pangas and singing the old songs of the struggle against Apartheid.  Somehow, the Lossgot and Moys piece, although smaller and less elaborate, by exploring the human all-too-human contradictions of relationships on the edge of precipice, seemed to speak to the reality of current life in Johannesburg.

^{(All the above photos by Christo Doherty -  photo albums of the performances can be viewed at Flickr )}

Photo from The Times coverage of the anti-foreign violence in Johannesburg.