From the viewer’s perspective, video installations can be a tricky medium to wrap your head around. The content is often obscure and indecipherable, and it’s all to easy too walk away feeling more than a little confused. However, if you’re armed with some background knowledge on the artist and their intentions, video installations can be a rewarding and fascinating art form.

One such exhibition, entitled ‘Mine’ (showing at Ductac’s Gallery of Light), presents video installations of 17 South African artists (including well-known notables William Kentbridge and Robin Rhode), in which they comment on personal ownership. Each artist also appears in his or her film. To help you understand the pieces, we asked five of the artists. to give us an insight into their work.

Johan Thom
Title of installation
‘Terms of Endearment’.

Length of film
Three minutes 49 seconds.

Describe your video installation.
In short, it’s a work in which I wanted to express something about the relationship between domesticity, art and the subconscious. For most of my career my home has also been my studio. There’s something interesting about the way in which art is simultaneously very personal and social, domestic and public.

What message are you trying to convey?
I think we ought to carefully examine the myriad ways in which ideas about dirt and cleanliness figure so prominently in the way we structure and understand the meaning of our lives.

Where do you appear in the film?
I appear made up in ‘skullface’, as a delirious character that seems to celebrate the material messiness of life even from beyond the grave.

Who inspires you?
The ingenuity of ordinary people.

Do you have a favourite filmmaker?
I love film generally, and three names come to mind immediately: Steve McQueen, Bill Viola and Werner Herzog.

What makes you proud to be South African?
We are a hybrid, multicultural nation.

…….

Also read Robin Rhode, Bridget Baker, Lerato Shadi and Jacques Coetzer’s pieces in the Time Out by clicking on this link:  South African video art.

Still from 'Terms of endearment' (2007) by Johan Thom

SABC Art Collection

VIDEO PROGRAMME WITH PUBLIC VIEWING SITES AROUND THE CITY

A looped programme of video artworks by Berni Searle, Vaughn Sadie, Nandipha Mntambo, Tracey Rose, William Kentridge, Stephen Hobbs, Marcus Neustetter, Jeremy Wafer, Stefanus Rademeyer, Johan Thom and James Webb will be screened in the convention centre in Durban from 5pm until late daily.

The same video programme will be screened at the The Green Hub, Blue Lagoon, uMgeni River Mouth, Durban from 27 November to 11 December daily.

Ader vaar die water in met ’n seilboot wat 12,5 vt (3,86 m) lank is – die kleinste boot waarmee die tog ooit aangedurf is.

Vir Ader vorm hierdie amper bomenslike taak deel van ’n kunswerk met die semi-magiese titel In Search of the Miraculous.

Ses maande later word die boot op die kus van Ierland gevind. Die houtstruktuur dobber halfgesink soos ’n skelet in die stil water. Van Ader is daar geen teken nie.

Daar is natuurlik altyd hoop. Miskien, soos Koos Kombuis sou sê, is “Bas Jan nie dood nie; hy’s net uitge-pass ”.

Nou en dan is daar opnuut bewerings dat Ader êrens in die wêreld ’n anonieme bestaan voer.

Myns insiens is spanning die groter tema in Ader se oeuvre. Kunskenners beweer sy werk ondersoek die idee van gravitasie.

Maar wat is gravitasie anders as ’n soort spanning tussen vorms? In Broken Fall (Organic), 1971, hang Ader met sy arms aan die tak van ’n boom totdat hy uiteindelik noodgedwonge laat gaan en in ’n watergrag plons.
Nou is hy hier; nou is hy weg.

So dan ook met die idee van ontsnapping.

Hoe kan ’n mens die bekende beperkings van menswees ontsnap? Of hoe sal ’n kunstenaar dan die bitsige onbenullighede van die kunswêreld kan fnuik en ontduik? In hierdie droom is ons mos almal iemand anders, met ’n ander, meer genoegsame lewe. (“As ek tog net kon reïnkarneer as ’n miljardêr!”)

Natuurlik is die romanse sterk hier. Ader as Vincent van Gogh? Nog een wat drome kon droom in kleure wat die res van ons nooit eens van geweet het nie.

Dinge is nooit so maklik nie. Telkens is die verhouding tussen drome en die realiteit; kuns en die samelewing meer kompleks as dit. Soos ’n seil wat amper dom-astrant bly uitsteek bo die water ten spyte daarvan dat die boot lankal gesink het.

Snaaks hoe die dinge uitwerk. Vir my is Ader nou meer aanwesig as wat hy was voordat hy verdwyn het, op soek na ’n wonderwerk.

’n Snit uit Bas Jan Ader se 16?mm-rolprent ­Broken Fall (Organic), 1971, 1 minuut 44sek.

This article originally appeared in Die Beeld

Johan Thom (2011)

The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Magick Truths

July 21, to August 21, 2011
Opening at July 20, 7pm
Opening hours from Thursday to Sunday, 1pm to 7 pm

Craig Baldwin (US), Bo Christian Larsson (SE), Alice Cannava | Occulto Magazine (DE), Johan Thom (ZA), Suzanne Treister (UK), Peter Wächtler (DE)

Perhaps it is not a mistake to dismiss paranormal phenomenon, occult teachings, spiritualism, telekinesis, para-psychology and so on as mere mischief. An enlightened self-awareness that rejects these phenomena as superstition and fairy tales blinds itself to their historicity, their complex social history and the hidden driving forces of their fascination. Since the 19^th century, disenfranchised by the rise of natural science and industrialisation, occult currents, relics of pre-modern worldviews and traditional images of religion, particularly the apocalyptic, have formed an ‘Underground of Europe’ (James Webb) consisting of heretical religious positions, unsuccessful social plans and rejected knowledge. Out of this complex mix a kind of ‘international occult’ has arisen.

A refusal to see enlightenment in this international movement falls short. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s (1831-1891) theosophical society delivered a global message of the ‘Universal Brotherhood of Humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or color’ in a time of extreme racism. Aleister Crowley’s (1875-1947) central rule (‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole law’) and Magick (‘The art and science of changing the world in accordance with the will’) appear as a sophisticated and regulated emancipatory program that no longer recognise external religious and secular authorities. As a result of his experimentation with drugs and sexual collective rituals, Crowley can be described as an ancestor of the self-directed hedonism that has marked all pop-cultural youth movements of the past sixty years.

However the mystics and magicians do not, by far, unite through a rejection of modernity. They frequently used the newest technology such as radio, photography and magnetic tape in order to expand the area of rational, empirical research into unknown territory and investigate the realm of supernatural phenomena. With Jack Parsons (1914-1952) the occultists had a pioneer of U.S. space travel within their ranks. Instead of seeing the occult and spiritual as a contrast program to rationalism and materialism, perhaps it is possible, in retrospect, to read them in terms of spaces that offer the possibility of processing concepts that have become questionable: Notions of body and matter, for example, or soul and spirit, sickness and health, life and death, individuality and community, gender roles and the exploration of artistic production.

This explains the fascination of many Avant-Garde artists for these ideas, ideas that produced decisive impulses for modernist aesthetics. Hence in their search for a ‘new language’ they were offered space to experience passivity in artistic creation that author-oriented theories were excluded from. Are the thought processes of artists and mystics so different? Do they not both position the subject as an essential variable in the cognitive process and believe that through contemplation they can recognise truth?

In this exhibition various positions within contemporary art will trace occult thought throughout history and into the present.

Funded by Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen and Kulturamt der Stadt Leipzig.