Media Flaws

Lost and confused: “Sorry where is the NY Now exhibition?”
Me: “NY 1? That’s in Gugulethu or Nyanga dear.”
L.A.C: “No, no I mean the DJ Spooky exhibition – New York is Now.”
Me: “Oh! Just walk down to the next building – it WAS there.”

Pause. Rewind. Press Play: Paul Miller better known as DJ Spooky is an artist, musician, and writer from New York. Before the 24th of February I only knew DJ Spooky as that subliminal music brainchild from the States. An art exhibition was the last thing on my mind as I read and re-read his interview with James Webb: “It kind of reverse-engineers some of the issues that started Surrealism – mainly how Europe appropriated many of the themes of what was going on in Africa, Asia and Latin America. I wanted to create a portrait of New York as a series of fictions and video poems, but crafted with Africa in mind.”

Anyway, on the 24th of Feb DJ Spooky graced us with his presence at the Michaelis Gallery, Cape Town. His statements and deep philosophical insights and references to post-modernism, surrealism and art whatnots really changed my views on his music. It just didn’t sound like a DJ talking - a Disc Jockey? maybe a Word Jockey (WJ)? As I gazed at his featured work I found myself thinking: Why am I watching King Kong sequences that are juxtaposed with arbitrary walk-with-a-limp beats and the odd lounge sound. It didn’t make sense. So I turned to the press release that said: “…using archival footage and early avant-garde cinema mixed with his own music, New York is Now is an exploration of memory through the interplay of images and sounds; creating a digital multimedia opera about a city made of improvisations, disjunctions, overlapping histories and multiple rhythms.”

Okay.

Somewhere along the lines of his opening speech DJ Spooky went into some exoticism of a certain ‘Hottentot Venus’ who’s “ass” was cut off, packaged and exhibited around the world. The audience kept on hissing Saartjie Baartman, but Spooky ignored them all, until a senior Art theorist/ critic, Andrew Lamprecht, corrected him. The theorist/critic, seeming quite worked up, slashed Spooky for presenting a poor historical account of the said ‘Hottentot Venus’ and undermining certain facts about Africa in his seemingly self-indulgent African narrative journey or opening speech. DJ Spooky retorted by acknowledging that a) he could be wrong and b) his knowledge of the ‘Hottentot Venus’ and Africa was what he got online and via US media. And on and on it went -. -. -. -. -. until an American art lecturer stepped in to ask about the innovations of sound, art and mixed media teachings, etcetera, etcetera.

So the exhibition ended three days ago. You can’t see it. You’ll just have to take my word for it. My word: You probably wouldn’t have understood it, unless you were at the opening or had read the press releases. Trust me. I’m being serious. I witnessed Design Indaba fanatics and general members of the public excitedly rushing into the exhibition and then 10 minutes later walking out with WTF? facial expressions. Problem 1: There was no artist statement in the venue - people are used to being spoonfed with visual clues or some form of textual guidance to make sense of an artist's work; unless of course the artist wants every Tom, Dick and Harry to plaster their own interpretetion to his/her work. Just music, film sequences and abrupt editing. Maybe I’m being too simplistic. So I’ll stop here and congratulate DJ Spooky for having the courage to present his either too advanced or too simple work to a premature African audience that is struggling to even grasp last decades so called Conceptual Art, and now they are expected to digest this too?