Things fall apart

Greg Streak’s latest exhibition Accumulative Disintegration is a psychological snapshot of our times, writes Peter Machen.

If ever an exhibition title resonated with the spirit of the times, it is Accumulative Disintegration, from acclaimed Durban artist Greg Streak. As the first decade of the 21st century starts to draw to a close, it often seems that the world – the climate, the economy, society itself – is falling gradually apart. The show, currently installed at Bank Gallery in Florida Road, uses the cut and the blade as its central elements, accompanied by the implied bedfellow of blood, the work all the while clinging to the gallery surfaces as if it was skin.



Cloud
2007-2008
Stainless steel, razor blades (2000), steel wire cable, d-shackles
1300 x 500 x 300mm(variable in space)

The dominant work, or at least the one that I noticed first, is titled Cloud. A three dimensional arc of metal hangs from the ceiling, its bottom surface covered in regimented rows of razor blade. It is a remarkably visceral piece; standing underneath it is an experience of heightened reality, as an inverted vertigo seems to pull the viewer upwards towards the blades. Next to the cloud – although I imagine that most viewers would see it only after having circled the gallery – is a companion piece called Secrets (for those who don’t have) which consists of 2 000 paper envelopes for razor blades contained in a Perspex box.



Secrets (for those who don't have) [detail]
2007-2008
2000 sealed paper envelopes (for razor blades), perspex, powder-coated mild steel
200 x 140 x 35mm

At the end of the gallery, a large piece called For every time I wish you hadn’t bears countless cuts, marks that seem to suggest both self-flagellation and imposed violence. In another piece, Paper cuts on the skin (random but deliberate), the cuts have inverted, seemingly keloided into scars.

Accumulative Disintegration is full of lacerations. While it is no doubt an exploration of the artist’s own recent experiences, it also reflects our own individual and collective frustrations and pains, mental, emotional and physical. And to contain all the tears caused by the all the cuts, all the blood, all the pain, are hundreds of little Envelopes for tears constructed out of insulating tape and herded into the convention of the frame.



Envelopes for tears [detail]
2008
White insulation tape, ABS plastic, MDF, wood frame
1320 x 870mm

Taking all the pieces in the exhibition as a collective narrative, it is this work which offers, if not redemption or salvation, at least a place to cry, a place to acknowledge our pain. Despite the one-off emotional theatre of the TRC, this is not something we like to do in South Africa; repression is a more favoured option. The envelopes for tears are doubly moving because of their size. On the one hand, they are exactly the right size to hold real tears. On the other hand, they would be carried away in torrents if they invited the tears of the planet, the nation, or even the surrounding surburbs.

Despite all the repetitive brutality on show in Accumulative Disintegration, there is a strangely transcendent warmth to the exhibition which glows – barely – as if in a strangely metallic dusk. That glow might be the relief of catharsis, of shared experience. For in this new South Africa, as in the old, we are all brutalised in countless ways. That does not mean that we are not also warm and compassionate people. We are, after all, human, and capable of so much.
And somehow, engaging with the works in Accumulative Disintegration, their attempt at some kind of emotional precision, combined with Streak’s remarkable ability to pull abstraction into the concrete, ignites that feeling of being human, and suggests how much we have to lose if we choose not to let our scars heal.

Then there is the fact that these scars, these marks of experience – as well as the new life and fresh experience that also comes with the passing of time – are the marks of pain, and pain always has a lesson to learn. Pulling back from most of the works, moving the focus from the micro the macro, new forms reveal themselves. In many of the works, the repetition of small individual marks – made presumably at some kind of random – builds up to reveal a larger landscape.

And what I saw – and perhaps I am just a shiny, foolish optimist – was landmasses, continents, islands – a new world being forged in the darkness.

- Peter Machen
Weekend Witness (16 August 2008)

Critique on “Accumulative Disintegration”

It is not strange to the tradition of art that art has been used to document, in the various manners available to it, history and history in the making. For instance, the Romans, using a variety of media, represented events such as military triumphs, civic benefactions, revolutions, general culture and even religious sacrifices. It has then subsequently become the task of civil society to collect and protect these bits of documentation, premised on the notion that they are direct links, as opposed to retrospective links, to our past. The artist has, in this sense, also taken on the role of scribe. So, save the commonly perceived and often highly controversial roles which society already ascribes to the artist, the artist does frequently come to serve as a sort of archivist for the constantly evolving social and political history of human kind.

It is in the light of art sometimes serving this end that I comment on the latest exhibition by Greg Streak, titled Accumulative Disintegration.

The exhibition as a whole seems very easily interpreted as a comment on both a pervasive and also deeply felt sense of social and political disintegration. But it would be a mistake to see this commentary as only pertaining to a condition particular to South Africa. The complete lack of ethnicity, ensured by the careful choice of universal and entirely culture neutral symbols, is a signature property of this exhibition. It appears that Streak has, in a very measured and deliberate manner, created an experience which captures a global sense of uneasiness, instability and the apparent falling apart of the systems we deeply rely on. But all this is interspersed with little pieces of hope. And it is this fact which grounds it even further in reality. The dance of society and politics has always been a string of events, succeeding each other in a manner not dissimilar to the notion of thesis and anti-thesis. Streak’s articulation does not fail to take note of this pulse, which is history.

It is my view that the works of art which consist this exhibition hang on the walls like the portraits of famous war heroes, leaders, great intellectuals, martyrs and reformers of society. They stand in guard of human heritage in the same manner as the painted and sculpted scenes in our public spaces and archival halls, which have captured events such as famous battles, uprisings, executions, economic depressions and civic celebrations. But it is not within the nature of the modern man or woman to appreciate the literal interpretation of such goings on. Art has a new language, and Streak speaks it.

For every falsely justified war that ends, if it is true that The end always has a beginning, we must wait to see if it will be the beginning of a Penance in progress. If the world had Envelopes for tears and little bits of paper wrapping for all its Secrets, we would already have run out of space. And the fact that acts of violence are mostly random but deliberate and can, despite the fact that these are portrayed as nothing more serious than Paper cuts on the skin of humanity, still cause a Rush of Blood is a sign of our times. We are filled with contradiction; the grossest acts of disrespect can be redeemed by nothing more than excuses for survival and, simultaneously, the study of something as innocuous as the Anatomy of a captured snowflake can lead to bizarre revolutions about the basic rights of all things inanimate.

Since we live in strange times our history calls for documentation of a genius type. It seems to me as if it would be impossible to really capture these past few decades in any other language but the one which Accumulative Disintegration has appealed to. The times are those of a society purging itself on the monochromatic diet of notions about fairness and equality, while insidiously hating each other for being as varied as the textures of a thousand razor blades and the softness of a snowflake.

And, the suggestion is, that it is our responsibility to capture these pieces for future reference.

- Carin Goodwin

(Carin Goodwin has received a master’s degree in philosophy, specialising in the philosophy of language. She is currently pursuing her PhD in a similar field. Goodwin has a particular interest in art and literature and has recently started writing as a critic).

Greg Streak - Accumulative Disintegration

Greg Streaks solo show Accumulative Disintegration, is currently on at Bank Gallery. The exhibition’s title creates an expectation of tension: a potentially fraught space created by a body of work that reflects “the battle of trying to pull things towards a whole whilst they disperse around us” (Streak, 2008).

The exhibition, in contrast to its title, is calm and considered, setting up the dichotomy that moves between works that appear to capture an accumulative essence and those that are disintegrated. Whilst few of the pieces demonstrate the tension between these two concepts Streak rather utilises the ambiguity and contradictions between the titles, the works and himself as a conceptual device to explore these elements. Marks left on the surfaces of the works are emotionally charged by the titles, drawing the viewer to find personal meaning in the abstracted self-reflection.The paired down aesthetic, suggests an ordering or making sense of his internal conflict. The simplicity at times makes the dialogue seem singular, with the contemplative and repetitive mark making in the works adding to an insular feeling. The works that do not hold this mark are implicated as causal possibilities in the process of scaring or excavating through their positioning to the other works.

As Streak suggests he was trying to find the poetry of life, extending a mark in an attempt to find visual equivalents of darkness, penance and difficulty. The exploration across paper, super wood and canvas allows for the understanding of the single mark to shift as it translates differently on the surfaces of the varied media. The physical act of marking is now imbedded in the surface. These surfaces not only denote the passing of time but also serve as a metaphor for personal growth, in its varied intensities.





Penance in progress [detail]
2007-2008
Canvas, cotton thread, wooden stretcher frame
760 x 380mm




Paper cuts on the skin (random but deliberate) [detail]
2008
MDF, pewter, filler
500 x 300mm

In Penance in progress and Paper cuts on the skin (random yet deliberate) 2008, the marks made with pewter “scars” and red thread are raised from the surface and these combined with the titles of the works, make a clear reference to martyrdom and the masochistic. This brings me to two questions; (1) Is this central to the audiences understanding of the show and (2) Are these works a reflection of the ritualised ways that society expects us to deal with and display pain?

A (1): I am not sure whether this is central to the audiences understanding of the show. These two works in particular (although others might also) do make reference to a self-flagellation - a personal underscoring. I do think that some of this work was a catharsis and a way of me working through some personal anguish and trauma. It was about an ending and new beginnings - about things falling apart and the human tendency to try and hold them together.

A (2): I am not sure whether there is any overt expectation of how we are to deal with pain. For me the works were most definitely a catharsis and a meditation and the process an exorcism of pain.




… a rush of blood [detail]
2007-2008
Print – archival ink on archival paper
600 x 400mm

… a rush of blood, Someday I will find you, The end always has a beginning 2007-2008, are a series of archival digital prints scanned from original ink drawings. They shift our attempts of looking from the macro to the micro focusing our attention on the intensely rendered details . The titles of the drawings allude to what these unseen emotive spaces might look like: a haemorrhaging reality, an optimism to one day transcend the human condition and our inability to comprehend our own mortality. What stood out in these pieces was the intensity of mark making. Is this then an attempt of you trying to make sense or find meaning through catharsis?

A: Perhaps on a sub-conscious level, but essentially the works were really attempts at looking at the inter-connectedness of things. The way in which isolated nodes remain just that unless co-joined to another. I find Someday I will find you and …a rush of blood quite corpuscular; of the inside of the body – almost as if magnified under a microscope. The end always has a beginning is more cosmological – of another world. I really think these works were more about reflecting on individual and collective connections – in what I see as a very disconnected world.

During the walk about you commented on the banality of your materials. My understanding is that these materials are ordinary and commonly used. Can you elaborate on the choice of these materials and what you are attempting to do?

A: I think what I was suggesting is that some of the materials be they insulation tape, scotch tape or merely cotton thread are materials of almost everyday use. They are things we have lying in a drawer at home or on our desk. For me it was about taking the ordinary and imbuing them with value; about taking their banal and focused function and creating something more poetic and suggestive.


During the walk about, you suggested that the work could be read through many lenses or contextual references and that your objective was to promote self-reflection and personal interaction. When questioned further, your response was that the work might relate to how our sense of things are impacted by a state of dis-ease: contradictions and the manipulations inherent in the media and political institutions. You recently curated Dis-ease, a new generation of video art from the Rijksakademie archives that questioned the notions of art practice and identity within the “global village”. This is one of several bigger projects that you have conceptualised that deal specifically with social issues. How would you contextualise your solo show Accumulative Disintegration in this broader body of work?

A: Firstly I am not sure whether the objective was to promote self-reflection and personal interaction – I just think the work maybe has that element to it. I think that my artistic practise has been, for some time, split between two realities. One that feels compelled to listen to my social conscience and construct projects and or debates around the impacts of living in an abnormal society that is South Africa, and more and more the global village we all find ourselves in. And then on the other hand the need to be more personally insular and reflect in a more acute way on that very same world. I think that Accumulative Disintegration was a long overdue body of work that allowed me some time in my own head for its own sake. I have spent the last few years focusing on the external and creating forums and opportunities for others to engage. It has been a much needed relief to go inward for a short while.


Thank you for your contribution and your time.

Vaughn Sadie