As Above So Below
Solo exhibition at The Market Theatre Galleries, Johannesburg, South Africa
Urban survival tactics by Kathryn Smith
Exhibition review: ArtThrob Archive: Issue No. 36
http://www.artthrob.co.za/00aug/reviews.html
Mark Dunlop's debut solo exhibition 'As Above So Below' is critically informed by this artist's suburban subjectivity transposed onto an elegantly postmodern reading of urban space. On ascending the Market Theatre Gallery stairs, an ethereal video projection called Negotiable City pumps out 'To Let' signs that Dunlop has filmed around the metropolis. That the audience to which the show speaks, or at least the audience that has an appreciation for young, contemporary art, comes from the suburbs, is a revealing assumption on the part of the artist.
Negotiable City speaks about a feared space - the city as dead or deviant in some way. Decentralisation has seen those with financial means move out of the CBD to create a new, very affluent one in the north. The city is now up for grabs, as so many vacant spaces suggest. These spaces are being filled by a new demographic that the middle class would rather ignore, but the piece reads as a fascinating historical loop, harking back to the grab-mentality days of the goldrush. The action hasn't changed, just the means by which it happens. It also asks the question whether what is available is valuable, and to whom.
On the second flight of stairs, six monitors play back looped images of people getting on and off escalators, filmed at a range of different shopping malls in the city. The details, both architectural and in the amount of shopping bags people are carrying, would indicate a certain level of affluence and expendable income. Playing at different speeds, the videos are quite hypnotic in their banal recording of a simple action, but their level of intervention on the part of the artist, in terms of timing and placement, suggests a more metaphoric reading of the point of communion between urban geographies, consumer desire and social compulsion: it's all about ascending. At least, that's what they'd have you believe.
The show is titled 'As Above So Below', and an eponymous series of video-mediated photographic stills of Santarama Miniland in the south of Johannesburg cunningly distort one's sense of scale, simulation and reality. The mediation implies distance, but the monstrous presence of an actual lizard next to miniature people on the stairs of a simulated building is Godzilla-like.
In a visually simple but cannily-devised floor piece, Dunlop has stencilled the names of Johannesburg streets at the right angles where the floor tiles intersect, creating a grid structure echoing the manner in which the city itself is laid out. But look a little closer and you realise that in reality, Market does not intersect 'Risk' Street any more than Harrow intersects with 'No Suggestions', as this map would have you believe. Dunlop has repeated the same crafty exercise he gave us on 'Unplugged V', feeding names into a computer and letting spell-check do its thing. A brilliant take on semiotics, what emerges is the arbitrariness of naming, but also the happy accidents that can emerge when words, while visually similar, take on new inflections.
There is, in the exhibition title, a vague sense of the quasi-religious. The ways in which Dunlop portrays his readings of a violent and usually chaotic urban space are cool, minimalistic and rather detached, bespeaking an attempt to make sense of a space which for him, is a locus of paranoia.
The exhibition is made up of a series of signifiers that function as nodes by which your experience of the city is negotiated. As gallery manager and urban master Stephen Hobbs points out, the suburban sensibility of 'erasing' the inner city is revealed in the invitation image. An extreme low-angle shot of an icon in the emergency lane of the highway indicating 'no cars' is juxtaposed with an extreme high angle shot of the Brixton tower, effectively cutting out the horizon line altogether, "as if you cut out the body and all you're left with are the head and feet."
Photographs of the backs of blister-packed tranquilizer 'Urbanol' are titled Better Living Through Chemicals and Effects of Overdosage Not Specified, as the drug is generically packed with no contraindications specified. The line between coping and dying is a thin and blurry one.
From sound bytes of people answering questions about safety precautions they use when travelling through the city, or spaces they won't go to, to drugs specifically designed to relieve the stress of urban living, to a view of the actual city from the gallery window, this show is a sophisticated take on a flavour-of-the-month topic.
