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"WHERE THE MOUNTAIN MEETS THE CITY" One of the year 2000’s most memorable exhibitions was "One", a collaborative venture between Arlene Amaler-Raviv and Dale Yudelman at the Association for the Visual Arts. This widely acclaimed show attracted glowing encomiums partly because it provided such an extraordinary revelation of the pair’s flair for potent image making. There were 200 works and all seemed energised by a buoyant vitality. These muscular images of South African street life struck one as invigoratingly fresh and original. Yet they captured motifs so utterly characteristic of this country and its people, that our consciousness immediately assimilated them. There they assumed iconic status, etching themselves into our memory, and transforming our perception of the world. THE THEMES OF THE TWO ARTISTS As a painter Arlene’s leitmotif has long been the faceless, dispossessed black man, portrayed with monumentality, dignity and grandeur as he strides purposefully through a degraded urban landscape in urgent quest of work, money, shelter, food or some other basic necessity our society fails to provide. Frequently these questing figures exude a strength and determination which testify to their unshakeable faith in themselves, their people, and their future. Their mood of buoyant resilience injects a tentative note of hope into the artist’s ambiguous and open-ended visual scenarios. The miasma of fear and uncertainty that blights our decaying cities is offset by the ebullient vibrancy of their black inhabitants. Dale and Arlene have a keen sense of the moral splendour; the emotional largesse and incorrigible good cheer that so ennoble the black people. A people who have suffered so grievously, and yet - in general - remain so ready to forgive and forget. Yet their sympathies and their images extend to a far wider range of individuals. Long Street and its environs possess a paradoxical quality. Because of its quaint colonial charm, and abundance of restaurants, cafes, bars, discos, nightclubs and lodges for back-packers, it has become one of Cape Town’s major entertainment strips. Unlike its rivals in the Mother City, Long Street has a funky counter-culture quality to it. It is one of the few spots where inter-racial mixing takes place on a notable scale, and its ethnic variety and slightly African quality attract many locals and tourists. Because this teeming inner-city venue is so tolerant, it is also thronged with street children, the homeless, the jobless, misfits, outsiders, flamboyant eccentrics, drag queens and mildly deranged individuals. It is this unique melange of qualities that attracted the photographer and the artist to the site, and one senses that their vicarious participation in the joy and suffering of the street’s incredibly diverse dramatis personae is far more intense than it is in the case of almost any other artist. THE ESSENCE OF THE COLLABORATION Arlene Amaler-Raviv’s theme of the neglected proletariat struggling heroically for survival loomed large in the photographer, Dale Yudelman’s socially committed work long before he met her. The coincidence of their visual inspiration, and their shared outrage and compassion explain why their collaboration - which blends Yudelman’s photography with Amaler-Raviv’s painting – functions so seamlessly. Photography and painting are integrated into a new artistic unity. The unique strength of the one media is combined with that of the other, and in this way, the work creates a far more pungent impact, than either form of representation could achieve on its own. The gritty photographic prints root the images in the reality of our downbeat inner-city streets, and infuse the paintings with the documentary veracity unique to photography. The expressive, gestural freedom of Amaler-Raviv’s brushwork liberates the photograph from the shackles of factual realism, and elevates the images into poetic statements. "WHERE THE MOUNTAIN MEETS THE CITY" In their new show, "Where the Mountain Meets the City", the painter’s loose, summary touch seems even more raw, impetuous and fiery: it creates a tense sense of urgency and rush, although her every mark is magisterially right. There are bravura morceaux of strokes, swipes, smears, drips, trails, dots and blobs that assert an abstract beauty in their own right, yet the artist’s vision is so crisply focused that such passages never distract from the overall unity of the work. "Where the Mountain meets the City" achieves the same archetypal visual authority as "One", and deals with the same theme - the plight of the outsider, especially that of mysterious, solitary, wandering ‘bergies’ and ‘strollers’. However there is a fascinating shift in emphasis. THE THEMES OF "WHERE THE MOUNTAIN MEETS THE CITY" Cape Town’s seedy urban landscape often dominates man in this suite of 16 views up the streets that bisect Long Street, and run up into the Bo-Kaap where Signal Hill flows down into the city, and terminates the vista. Cape Town’s integration of the townscape with the mountain is something these two artists find unique, and their vision of the way the high green slopes pour into our architectural spaces endows their images with a strange lyrical blend of the squalid and the spectacular. Not all is gloom. There are a few images of joie de vivre which create a far more upbeat mood than that expressed in their first joint exhibition, "One" "BLOEM" for example, injects an almost Neapolitan sense of dolce far niente into the streetscape. The upper register of the painting is entirely filled with laundry fluttering on lines strung between buildings in the improvised manner of the Mediterranean port’s tenements, while on the empty street below a band of children merrily play ring-a-ring-rosy. "DORP" fills the street with a Malay bride, groom and retinue and creates a similarly festive atmosphere. Although variation dispels any sense of monotony, these satisfyingly definitive compositional solutions are generally geometric, centralised, and frequently, symmetric: vertical buildings frame the image and surround the bold horizontals of macadam in the foreground which often support a triangle of receding street. Sometimes colour collapses distance, and the particular choice of photographic lenses, often distorts, making the mountain ranges appear far more close than they are in reality. They shove into the picture space making the image as claustrophobic as the life of the street people enclosed within it. This pressure and spacelessness function as a metaphor for their lack of opportunity, freedom or choice. THE ARTIST’S NEW VISION The area, which includes part of the Malay quarter, has long been the stomping ground of artists, but "Where the Mountain meets the City" rejects charming ‘local colour’ and eschews the sentimental picturesque tradition established by Boonzaier, Naude, Wenning, Prowse, Zerffi and Spilhaus who romanticised poverty by concentrating on charming crumbling architecture and a winsome staffage of urchins, cheerful chubby washerwomen, donkey-carts, pets and fowls. The brilliant Marxist critic John Berger maintains that Picasso’s extremely mannered periode bleu and rose images of poverty-stricken acrobats and clowns appealed so immensely to the rich because they presented the poor as ‘pathetic’, i.e. as devoid of the inner resources which would enable them to cope with their condition, mobilise and pose a militant threat to capitalism. Arlene and Dale’s images by contrast, persuade us that the disadvantaged - mentally, socially, economically and racially - are slowly taking charge of our history, and that soon they will dictate its course. THE IMPLICATIONS OF THE WORK Accompanied by the painter, the photographer took most of the photographs early on Sunday mornings when there are few people and even fewer cars about. This creates an oppressive sense of emptiness. This largely deserted wasteland is dominated by traffic signage, robots, yellow and white lines, pedestrian crossings, arrows, stop and parking signs which seem to hint at both authoritarian control and its collapse. Lurching perspectives that whisk you into distance with hectic momentum introduce drama and suspense into these urban vignettes where sinister figures lurk on the sidewalks, and violence seems imminent. The exhausted fabric of the city with its ubiquitous ‘To Let’ signs testifies to chaos and decline: derelicts scavenge for building materials and spirit them away on their heads: scaffolding is up: cranes loom on the skyline. Everything is changing – socially, politically and economically – but whether for better or worse remains an open question. NEW DIRECTIONS IN THE WORK Although the dominating style of "Where the Mountain meets the City" is, to coin a phrase, a kind of expressionist realism, in certain images the artists depart from this, and introduce dream elements and anti-naturalistic detailing of a symbolic type. In "LONGMARKET" a swiftly pacing black man in the foreground seems about to step beyond the framing edge. Above him and the Cape-Town skyline appears part of the map of the grid of Johannesburg’s city and suburbia. Maps serve to guide the disorientated visitor, but one imagines that the painter has also introduced the cartographic detail to hint at her subjects thought processes. So many black people migrate from city to city in search of work, that he may be planning to go to Johannesburg to find employment, or alternatively longing nostalgically to return there. The detail suggests impermanence, arrival and departure. Vast numbers of people constantly quit the rural areas for the major cities, but they continually return to see family or attend weddings, funerals and initiation ceremonies. Such lives are a matter of va-et-vient, and the Johannesburg map hovering above Cape Town skyline, suggests divided loyalties, deracination and the lack of any real sense of home. The grid-like pattern can also be seen as symbolic of the disciplined regularity and solitariness of first world urban life, all of which are inimical to traditional black culture. In "HOUT", a tense work about the psychological constrictions of poverty and city life, a naked lady advances down the street in full view of a bunch of rather menacing-looking men. She is painted in a rather ghostly shade of white that suggests she could be a revenant or a figment of the artist’s imagination. Behind her she carries a blanket which blows away from her back in the breeze. One supposes that this represents all the emotional baggage she is attempting to shed, so as to evolve into a free and integrated person. The nudity suggests that she longs to achieve full acceptance of her emotional, spiritual and physical being. The male onlookers however may rape or assault her, so the painting concerns the element of risk-taking and vulnerability endemic to any spiritual quest. My only criticism of the show is that in one or two works the introduction of surreal elements into the streetscape – such as a carpet and and furniture contained within a isometric box in "DORP" – do not really work. This is not because one fails to understand them, but simply because Surrealism and Realism aim at divergent effects, and form a stylistically uneasy alliance. Obviously "DORP" corresponds to the artist’s vision of harmony, of a new order in South Africa where the public spaces of the city are as welcoming and secure as the private spaces of people’s homes. THE TECHNICAL INNOVATIONS WHEREBY LIGHT PLAYS AS KEY A ROLE AS PIGMENT As I stated earlier "Where the Mountain meets the City" is principally concerned with the upheavals and dislocations of a society in the process of social, political and economic transformation. In a word, the theme of the exhibition is change. Change too characterises the artist’s brilliant new technical innovations and ingenious use of glass and aluminium. Zwelethu Mthethwa and Louis Jansen van Vuuren have combined photography and painting, like many other artists, but they always use the conventional support of canvas, and this is where "Where the Mountain Meets the City" differs so profoundly, and achieves a far more dynamic effect. Two different bases act as ground for their images. Black and white photography is silk-screened onto glass or aluminium which is then painted over in part. All the works project five centimetres forward from the wall, and when the support is glass, the artist never paints over the entirety of the surface. She always leaves transparent areas, and often uses paint of varying degrees of transparency in order to create a range of novel effects. We glimpse the wall behind her figurations, thus creating a new sense of depth and space. The image on the glass is enormously enriched by what lies behind it - a whole series of shadows which vary, not only in their intensity, and also in their colours. The shadows cast by the translucent paint and untouched glass, fall onto the wall, creating double-images and overlap faintly reminiscent of Cezannian passage. The works on glass continually mutate as one circulates around them, but, in the case of the paintings on aluminium, this ability to totally transform themselves in appearance is even more astonishing. The tonality is a silvery grisaille set off by white and sombre emotive hues - a deathly black, smouldering sulphurous yellow and an ominous red, the colour of congealed blood. As the surface is reflective, strong illumination causes it to bounce back the light, and rival the brilliant sheen of a mirror. In dimmer conditions the aluminium loses some or all of its lustre, and the painting and its mood and atmosphere grow correspondingly dark and sombre. The surface has been scratched in certain areas, and this enhances the metals reflective potential, and deflects the light at different angles creating optical shimmer. Patches in the photographic images, have been scratched away to create blanks that adhere closely to the picture plane. These seem to emphasise the blankness of the lives of the people depicted, and also the extremely narrow range of opportunities available to those caught in a poverty trap. The scratching too, particularly in areas like the sky, creates atmospheric effects and simulates clouds, fog, mist or heat haze. Not only does the appearance of the aluminium and the scratching transform itself continually as the viewer moves around the painting and the intensity of the light changes. Further transformations occur because the colour of anything in the immediate vicinity of the painting – such as the viewer’s garments – is picked up by the metal, and it modulates the palette by introducing fresh tints of a subtle, shifting character. The works thus transcend the static quality of painting and photography, and become magic arenas of vigorous chromatic and luminary action. These volatile creations and their constant mood swings inject immense excitement into the imagery, and make the theme of change intrinsic to the very medium itself. |
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Review by Lloyd Pollak - Cape Times (Feb 28 2000) MEMORIALISING THE DISPOSSESSED One, a collaborative exhibition by Arlene Amaler-Raviv and Dale Yudelman. At the Association for the Visual Arts, 35 Church Street, Cape Town. This is certainly one of the most impressive and socially significant exhibitions to hit Cape Town in the past few years. It represents a collaboration between the painter, Arlene Amaler-Raviv, and the photographer, Dale Yudelman, both of whom are driven by a fierce passion for social justice, a deep humanity and a profound concern for the plight of the poor. Amaler-Raviv’s imprimatur has long been the faceless black man striding forward purposefully in the urban landscape portrayed with monumentality, dignity, grandeur and presence, despite his poverty and dereliction. This recurring image assets an iconic quality as an integer of our socially, racially and economically divided society. Where is he going? What is he looking for? Work Shelter? Food? A lost child or runaway wife? Who knows? Who cares? Yudelman is a photojournalist and his work is street orientated. Amaler-Raviv’s archetypal themes of walking men and women- often carrying burdens on their heads - occurred frequently in his photography long before he met her. The coincidence of their visual inspiration and deep respect for each other’s work explains why this collaboration works so flawlessly that it becomes difficult to separate Yudelman’s photography from Amaler-Raviv’s painting as the two media combine into such flawless harmony. The title One indicates the two artist’s communality, and underlines their theme of the isolated individual plunged in a chaotic, disintegrating society and strugling heroically for survival. This disorientation and distress are portrayed through the medium of Yudelman’s photographs reproduced as ink-jet prints on canvas mounted by rivets on to sheets of aluminum. Although the occasional untouched photographic image occurs, in the main Amaler-Raviv has either entirely enveloped or partly enveloped the original photograph in paint. The use of aluminum and metal slides to display the images, creates a metallic frigidity which reflects our industrial civilisation and mirrors society’s indifference to the ubiquitious hardship that surrounds us. Both Amaler-Raviv and Yudelman avoid the hermetic, self-referential quality of much contemporary art which fails to reflect the turmoil of the society it supposedly depicts. Their vast corpus of 129 works of different formats ranging from the tiny to the vast, all form clear, powerfull and highly emotive communications of undeniable relevance and immediacy. In their imagery, the lone individual at odds with a society that has betrayed him, is juxtaposed with teeming multitudes of unemployed people or indignent migrant laboures clinging to their pitiful clutch of possessions, and endlessly milling around. Often they are on the move, but the artists’s manifest deep insecurity as to whether they will arrive safely at their destinations, or achieve the purpose of their journey is left unexpressed. 'One' not only images the black proletariat, it also portrays the small comforts and cheap, basic goods that alleviate their miserable condition : the braziers around which they huddle in winter, the shopping trolleys used to shift possessions, and the government bread which sustains them. Amaler-Raviv portrays these objects with immense tenderness.She endows them with imperfections and irregularities that humanise them in a vaguely Oldenburgian way and establish an equation between the character of the object and the personality of thier owner. Many smaller paintings confront us with a shallow stage closed off by a background of adamantine unmodulated black. At centre occur the staples that support the derelict: the carry-bags that contain their meagre possessions which, like the burdens they convey on their heads, become potent symbols of all the traumatic psychological baggage they carry. The use of photographic negatives, pools of impenetrable black shadow and anti-naturalistic colour add tremendous drama to these mixed media creations, especially the triptych of long horizontal works hung at a bias and punctuated with emphatic verticals a` la Muybridge, which imbue these extremely cinematic, freeze frame images, with an exciting contrapuntal rhythm and beat. An animated film viewed through a peephole in an image on aluminum provides and eloquently rousing summa of the show in which newspaper billboards are covered in imagery which form mordant commententaries on the escapist attitudes in our society which refuse to acknowledge and accommodate the dispossessed. 'One' is an artistic coup de foudre in which two artists of unassailable moral integrity and profound human compassion have produced an array of unforgettably unsettling images which capture the essence of our urban environment and socio-political impasse with an incriminating incisiveness unrivalled by almost any other South African artist. |
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Cape Argus 'Tonight' - Monday February 25 2002 See your own city anew and askew Lucinda Jolly Where the Mountain Meets the City - a collaborative exhibition between artist Arlene Amaler-Raviv and photographer Dale Yudelman, at 232 Long Street until Superimposing and imposing ideas, opinions and/or beliefs is something we all do, whether consciously or unconsciously. We do it very well. Our memories and approaches are selective and subjective. We arrive with no baggage - unless you believe in re-incarnation, and not even the Buddha was sure about its existence, or that the sins of the fathers are visited on the children - and we leave with suitcases full, inherited from parental notions and the expectations of a great collective. Anyway, Where the Mountain Meets the City is all about superimposition. In this instance photographs of the roads intersecting the top of Long Street silkscreened onto perspex and aluminium, are superimposed with painted images. Superimposing is as old as the history of art. The San selected caves that were difficult to access to paint paintings whose meanings are still mysterious, and generations of shamans painted on top of other images with apparent disregard for the surrounding images. My visit to 232 occurs on one of those windless, blue-skied, hot, reasons-to-live-in-Cape-Town days. In contrast, the photographs show a world bled of colour, executed in shades of grey and white, translucent on the perspex, opaque on the metal. Although grainy, they retain a certain hard-edged quality that bumps up against the viscous overlay of oil paint images. The result is that both media succeed in complementing each other. Interestingly, the gallery is a point where place and image interface. Across the road is a sex shop advertising a day of viewing for only R20. A stately drag queen in an ash-blonde wig emerges from Lola's - a favourite haunt of the "kule" and the hip and the wannabes - and minces across the road. Glue-sniffing street kids hang about; you can hear many tongues from the backpacker haunts. You can buy a gun, go for a steam bath or have keys cut, buy a piece of dried wors or a haircut. Each work has a street name stencilled below. A foreigner might look at the images and just enjoy them as pictures but as a Kaapenaar one appreciates the images so much more because they are so familiar. And yet the context of familiar has undergone a surrealistic shift and becomes strangely unfamiliar. Yudelman's photograph of Bloem Street has a painted image of a chlorine-blue swimming pool and a swimming figure by Amaler-Raviv. A container ship eases her way down Pepper Street, reminding one of how much land Cape Town has reclaimed from the sea. In my grandmother's day Woodstock used to have a beach. A circle of small figures plays ring-a-roses, floating on top of an urban street; Muslims in their koviers and djellabas float above a street, a shadowy mosque in the background. At the end of the gallery is a metal sheet with the image of a container, its doors wide open, showing an old car and other assorted waste. Its an animated art-peepshow called The Din of Daily Life. Its proximity to a sex shop advertising all day for R20 is not lost on one. Put your eye to the circular hole and place the headphones on your head. Images accompany a sound track of talking Kaapies and music, with a commentary in the form of press billboards. See your reality askew, see it anew - take this one in. |
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Review by Sue Williamson - Artthrob (March 2000) Arlene Amaler Raviv and Dale Yudelman at the AVA Collaborations, as ArtThrob has had occasion to note in reviews of a number of previous exhibitions at the AVA, are not easy. Only too often, like a chop shop car, the new whole is less than the sum of the parts. It's a relief, then, to be able to hail the current show at the AVA as a seamless and integrated body of work which still manages to retain the individual aesthetics of the two artists involved. Dale Yudelman is a professional photographer with long experience of working as a journalist. Black and white photographs taken during his stint at The Star can be seen at Jo'burg, the upper Long Street bar. Arlene Amaler-Raviv is known for her painterly representations of modern city life, of head-down, hurrying people representative of the rushed busyness coupled with loneliness which so often marks urban existence, of brushy images of thestuff of life, like loaves of bread, and street signage. Perhaps the image one most associates with Raviv is a hatted and coated man caught in mid-stride as he crossesour vision on his way to some unknown destination. In 'One', currently on at the AVA, the two have merged the photographic with the painterly to produce a whole series of works which range from the very small to thequite large. Yudelman's photographs of elements and people of the city have been digitally imposed on to small rectangles of canvas, Raviv has painted into and overthese, and the canvas has been riveted on to an aluminium support. In turn, these rectangles of aluminium have a channel gouged out at the back allowing them to reston a rod which runs all the way round the Long Gallery at the AVA. One imagines if the doors of the gallery were closed and one were allowed to play, these could be slid along the support rod at speed, images on an assembly line, the interchangeable yet unique people and fragments of the city, banging into each other like dodgem cars. In the Main Gallery, the postcards morph into large poster sized images, still mounted on aluminium, in which one of the most dramatic shows a giant-sized man crossing a freeway. The shift in scale is intriguing, and one is put in mind of the outsized walkingmen of Jonathon Borofsky, with their everyman symbolism. And then there is a short animation film to be viewed down a peephole, entitled The din of daily life (U-store).This little opus alone warrants a visit to the AVA. To clunky music, a version of the recent history of the city is told through a series of newspaper billboards, shown attached to a pole, while in basic animation, other things 'happen' and even Madiba drops by. On the mezzanine, there are more variations of the small images in the Long Gallery, and this, perhaps is a mistake. One suddenly becomes a tad bored. The statement had been made in the galleries below. But let this minor quibble not hold you back fromviewing what is essentially a sharp and energetic performance by Yudelman and Amaler-Raviv.
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Review by Hazel Friedman - The Sunday Independent (Feb 27 2000) ONE - Art exhibition by Arlene Amaler-Raviv and Dale Yudelman Gritty urban bric-a-brac crackles with energy - ‘One’ integrates the power of the camera lens with an artist’s raw expressiveness. It is not often that one encounters the creative synergy that is shared so exuberantly by the artists Arlene Amaler-Raviv and Dale Yudelman. The chemistry crackles and snaps during their verbal interactions and translates into a vibrant, almost seamless, meeting of media and minds. An award-winning documentary photographer, Yudelman combines meticulous attention to detail with an obsessive exploration of the tools of his trade. Amaler-Raviv is equally obsessive but, as her expressionist brushstrokes suggest, in a less methodical way. Both possess a streetsmart urban sensibility. Both believe in serendipity and in stretching the parameters of their art to the limits. The fruits of their collaboration can be seen in One, a mixed-media exhibition of urban imagery - photographic and painted - on aluminium, as well as computer-generated animation. If process could be reflected in product, One would provide an extraordinary narrative on the tenacity of two complementary talents. This exhibition originally formed part of a fruitless proposal for Cape Town International airport but the artists decided to carry on anyway. They shot scenes at unconventional (photographically speaking) times of the day. They encountered street folk who became the prototypes of urban identity, such as the dignified Thulani - a homeless Zulu who is regarded as something of a hero in Cape Town’s Long street because he refuses to beg for money. These encounters and a litany of happy accidents propelled and cemented a collaboration of immense, meticulously processed, force. One integrates the power sophisticated documentary photography with the raw, emotive expressiveness of the painted mark. Their imagery includes the flotsam of everyday life. Amstel labels Ntsu logos on paper carrier bags, road signs, newspaper posters and faceless pedestrians trudging through crowded streets. This urban bric-a-brac is transformed to the status of icon, set against vast, industrialised vistas, pavements and highways. Both artists powerfully evoke the “din of the city”, the title of a series of panels, anonymous masses moving in grid-like uniformity that is broken by the quirkily displayed panels and vigorous strokes of colour. The effect is hard-edged, gritty and vibrant. It is as though one can literally “see” the babble of the crowds. In one work an enlarged silhouette steps over a highway - one of the recurring repertoire. This image becomes symbolic of the individual’s desire to assert identity amidst the urban throng. But the commentary trancends that of the merely contemporary. A reworked photographic image of a turn-of-the century mining town gives some insight into the transformations wrought by the bright lights and big city. An image of thousands of cloned soldiers defaced by the scribble “every son has a mother” refers to the patriarchal culture of military might on which the old South Africa was predicated. But the tour de force of the show is Yudelman's computerised animated film. Viewed as though a peep show, it encapsulates the din of city through an ingenious combination of pacey editing and urban imagery, offset against a thumping soundtrack performed by Robbi Robb (Tribe after Tribe). Born 'n Bred in the RSA is indelibly stamped on the film through Yudelman's quirky use of local icons and props. These include Madiba, the ubiquitous minibus taxis, newspaper posters with ever-changing headlines and lux beauty soap, with its good clean 'n white associations. Yudelman parodies this symbolism by filming a rolling bar of soap next to Afrikaans headlines announcing the new Miss South Africa. There's a bit of the old and the new, viewed as though from a passing car, slightly blurred and inevitably transient - a fitting filmic ode to inexorable urban change. And complementing Yudelman's street-smart sensibility is Amaler-Raviv's floor installation comprising newspaper headline posters covered by glass sheets. Identical to the posters in Yudelman's film, they serve as conceptual clips or extracts from their animated counterpart . Acessing the entire installation is impossible without literally trampling each component.. The visceral effect of the cracked, chipped glass amplifies the resonance of Amaler-Raviv's commentary on rural/urban conflagration and the contradiction between the new South African dream and the reality of dispossession on the gritty, city streets. |
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Review by By Paul Edmunds - Mail & Guardian (March 2000) Self and the city Hanging somewhere between the din of the city and the preciousness of our individual lives is where we most often find ourselves. It is this shifting and unsteady territory that Arlene Amaler-Raviv and Dale Yudelmanprobe in their collaborative show, One, at Cape Town's Association for Visual Arts. Consisting of two series of small mixed-media works, a video installation and a number of larger works, the show is thorough, consistent and very evocative. In the Long Gallery a large number of palm-sized works circling the room bring to mind the tracks of an earth-moving vehicle or a heavy gear. Most are hung at the same height, but the odd one is set off-kilter, upsetting the relentless uniformity. Yudelman's photographs and archival images are printed on small canvas squares onto which Amaler-Raviv has painted in her inimitable style which suggests an enviable amount of ease. The series is entitled Daily Life and it is here that the tension between alienating anonymity and individuality is called to testify. Offsetting the impersonal, unceasing pace of the city with images of personal identity and attachment, the works straddle these opposites. Each has the scale of a small possession or a personal history, but collectively they invoke the spectre of progress, commerce and cargo. One piece depicts an anonymous figure in the centre of an old-style telephone dial, beneath which is printed "resident". As complicated as the codes are, and as merciless as the city is, an individual's experience clings to its uniqueness and is identified by one particular sequence of digits. A walking figure is a recurrent image and appears in giant form, straddling foreign highways (in One-way) and old Jo'burg streets alike (in Jo'burg Man). It is persistent and ghostlike, full of pathos and never stops to rest. The show is infused with a feeling of a turning ratchet unable to check its inevitable progress. A familiar image in Amaler-Raviv's oeuvre, the telephone book, also recurs. In Address Unknown, weathered and abandoned, it is found where the head of an anonymous walker could be. A video piece - The Din of Daily Life - is housed in a painted aluminium structure through which a viewer peers via a lens-like hole. A series of newspaper headline boards in a Cape Town cityscape peopled by shifting figures and street furniture is shown. The headlines seem connected by a flow ofconsciousness, running the gamut from the very serious to the fairly frivolous. We go from learning that sex keeps you young, through the whole urban terrorism and crime debacle, back to beauty queens, the state of city toilets, racism, the elections and Y2K paranoia. The video begins with the sound of a touch-tone telephone and ends with the replacement of the receiver. The sensual bombardment by information, scandal and events-out-of-control all bottlenecks its way back to the individual experience. Upstairs in the Artsstrip, in what seems to me a gratuitous addition to the show, the aforementioned headline boards are milked for all they're worth in two further series of works. Fortunately this doesn't detract from the strength of the whole. There is a distinct Eighties feeling about the show and it is not surprising to learn that both artists lived and cut their artistic teeth in Jo'burg during this time (note the contribution of ex-Asylum Kid Robbie Robb to the video soundtrack). In lesser hands, some of their images could have proved twee but here they add to a whole which is sensitive, perceptive and just a little bit scary.
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Review by Cobus van Bosch / Translation from 'Die Burger' (21 Feb 2000) Concept of a Journey Central to an Overall View of Urban Life ONE, an exhibit by Arlene Amaler-Raviv and Dale Yudelman in the gallery of the Association of Visual Arts, 35 Church Street, Cape Town. Till 4 March. More than 170 works in mixed media from post-card format to banner scale as well as a computerised animated piece where the daily dynamics of the city and its squirming masses and dwellers are brought into view in this hugecollaboration by Amaler-Raviv (artist) and Yudelman (photographer). 'The exhibition investigates the individual inside us, the noise of the flyovers, the byways and subways and the ambient noise of daily life' say the artists. The city might well be full of individuals but people are here portrayed as faceless, in a mass - an ironic commentary on how the street swallows one's identity. Because this is when we shuffle past each other with expressionless faces and rigid expressions each with his own agenda and destination. On the street and on the sidewalk, human conveyor belts, the city gets a character of an arena full of types, from beggars to those who do not have to work, from wandering tourists, fun-seekers and shoppers to rushing workers. But eventually it is the interaction (or the lack thereof) in these public places that the small banal journeys, from somewhere to somewhere, intrigue Amaler-Raviv and Yudelman. They interpret the sidewalk travellers as well as all other objects that are there to be found - rubbish, motor cars, carrier bags and of course the posters of the media. Especially when the posters almost represent an Art-strip exhibition on their own the city is represented in a broader aspect. It tells a lot (or eventually nothing) for instance 'R100m for Rural Roads', 'Find your Dream Home' and 'Our New Miss South Africa'. In the animated work, a street scene observed through a peephole, there is a central poster stand (with ever changing titles), with figures, sometimes real sometimes painted, shuffling past. The observer is confronted with a large and visual exhibition with great variety (sometimes with too much variation about the same visual images) but fortunately it remains within the boundaries of a few basic concepts, for instance the nihilistic never-ending unanimity feeling of the chaotic urban motion. And centrally is the concept of a journey such as in the main gallery where large works on aluminium plates, glimpses focus not only on the street but also on the airports or a trolley full of luggage or even a journey through time like an enormous photograph wherein the latter-day urban dweller is gigantically superimposed on a busy street in the Johannesburg of yesteryear. As a collaborative project between two artists there is much intrigue and it is generally a powerful synthesis of their input. There are moments where Amaler-Raviv's sensitive and competent brushstrokes and other marks threaten to dominate the photographic contribution. This may be attributed to formal aspects rather than one artist trying to dominate the other. Because right or wrong, a photograph combined with other media especially where marks are applied on top, could easily be interpreted as the background of the artwork. The latter is a pity and inevitable because although the exhibition contains strong parallels with the themes that Amaler-Raviv has been busy with the last few years, Yudelman is no newcomer when it comes to the observation of urban dynamics. His strong political photo exhibition of Johannesburg during the 1980s is presently to be seen in Jo'burg Pub in Long Street and confirms his sharp and often satirical observational skills. design by tor hylen |
