So I went to the Ed Young / Christian Nerf ‘no problem in Africa’ DIVA talk at Wits yesterday and I have a secret to tell you: the bad boys of Cape Town aren’t that bad. In fact, they are charming, engaged, and extremely laid back. Now, truth be told, I already knew that about Christian – having briefly shared a studio with him downtown, we’d often have long chats about various, crit each other’s work and shoot the sh!t around ideas. He’s a fantastic guy, a great artist, and a generous thinker – I can’t say enough good things about him. But Christian, despite his work being funny and provocative and out of the norm, doesn’t really play into, out of, or care about, the public eye. He just ‘does’.
See, then there’s Ed.
Well, yeh. The guy has pissed off lots of people, said and done some stuff that gets people upset – and I do see why.
But to watch these two guys, I gotta say, you really have to like them… and by ‘them’ I mean their project. In isolation, some of the work may seem silly, and more than one commenter to me stated that they wished they could "get paid to party and tour Africa and drink beer" (me too). But hearing and seeing their discourse in near-entirety, internalizing their work methods and their continual questioning / disappointment, smiling through their lax attitudes vs the Spectacular art, it really starts to gel. Their performance is a kind of an inverted Wayne Barker – on so many levels – and if I have to explain this to you, I don’t think you’d get it (you’d have to spend some time with the guy). It’s a sociopolitical m9ndf@kc, where Ed probably says more about the egos of the art world than we are comfortable with, and Christian brings it up to the American-driven capitalist project – and the complicity or enactments of SA during and Post-Apartheid – on a macro scale.
I don’t make art like these guys, and I’ve never wanted to. But there is great value to what they are doing, and it is definitely going somewhere. We may not know where that is, and they don’t seem to know where that is either, but since when – especially in the contemporary art world – does ‘no product’ mean ‘unproductive’?
I realize I haven’t said much about the work itself, but we all know there’s more than enough info and press out there on these characters, and even more forthcoming with their current funded projects, so there’s not need for more. I’m just saying it’s worth paying attention.
PS And yes, as per my above comment, I told them they should put together a catalogue or large show to contextualize in just such a way as I had the pleasure to experience… Ed says he’s working on a catalogue, and Nerf is working with Kathryn Smith on other texts for upcoming exhibitions. I recommend checking these out when they are on offer.
