24 September 2011 – 22 October 2011

Threshold implies an upper limit to tolerance levels as climate change shifts the balance long established in ecosystems. The exhibition, as its title suggests, engages the premise that not only are the climatic conditions of the planet at a tipping point, but that we need to enter into closer relationship with the earth, this place we call home.” Curator: Virginia MacKenny, 2011.

Younge visited the area around Cuito cuanavale, the site of intensive struggle during the 1987-88 offensive by the SADF (supporting UNITA) against FAPLA and Cuban soldiers. As a form of witnessing, Younge painted indigenous birds decimated by the conflict on the underside of vellum stretched over the detritus of war… His project was, as he puts it, a way of “reactivating the airwaves”. Recreating images of birds not seen in the area for years his act of recovery was recognised by locals who identified, in the vernacular, birds’ names such as ‘Mutoko’, Tshihundjo, and Ondia Makunde’.” Virginia MacKenny, 2011

Samuel Hendricks
2009
Archival ink on paper
1950 x 1120

(Assistant: V. Cowling)

Hiératiques, frontaux, glorieux. Nulle aspérité, nulle transfiguration de la réalité ne vient entacher la confrontation directe avec l’appareil photographique lorsque Gavin Younge, le temps d’une série de clichés, cristallise des portraits d’hommes noirs sur fond blanc au sein d’une composition froidement structurée. Pris de plain-pied, ces portraits sériels se délivrent sans aucun artifice dans une neutralité délibérée, semblant ainsi emprunter les codes plastiques d’une photographie documentaire telle qu’a pu la pratiquer August Sanders ou Walker Evans dans les années 1920-1930, alors qu’ils tâchaient de rendre compte des hommes de leurs temps à la fois dans leur dignité individuelle, mais aussi dans leur rôle social. Maud de la Forterie, 2009. Deep Skin. La Noire Galerie, Paris

+ de informations – contact@lanoiregalerie.com

Après avoir, le temps de la manifestation nationale Monuments et Animaux, colonisé divers sites à travers la France, certaines bêtes hivernent à Paris. Elles viennent peupler une forêt mystérieuse implantée au sein de la Conciergerie. 

En s’aventurant dans cet espace sauvage, le public fera d’étranges rencontres. Au gré de sentiers à thème – l’allée des chimères, la route du lac ou le chemin du bout du monde –, il découvrira des oeuvres surprenantes : objets de fantasme, miroirs réfléchissant nos travers et nos faiblesses ou témoins alarmants des grands enjeux environnementaux, les créatures ici rassemblées illustrent les diverses fonctions de l’animal dans l’imaginaire de nos contemporains.

Commissaire : Claude d’Anthenaise, Directeur du Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, assisté de Raphaël Abrille, Conservateur au Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature.

The Foster Gang is  a collection of ‘fossil’ cameras in sculptural format. The son of a failed gold prospector himself, Younge is intrigued by the web of deceit, intrigue and plain crookedness that built the City of Gold. This ‘family portrait’ of the infamous brigand and his associates, along with his vellum ‘bokkie’ Peggy (see below), points to a hominoid conundrum—are we the hunters, or the hunted?  ’This is Younge’s forté, to treat history as a story not yet fully told.’
Mark Read, Foreword, Gavin Younge [Cradle Snatcher], 2010.

Peggy. 2010. Vellum, resin cast, bamboo. 180 x 130 x 86 cm (Photo: G. Younge)

For sale throughEverard Read Gallery – 011 788 4805 or 021 418 4527

Flight Delayed. 2010. Vellum, oxhide, plywood, styrofoam. 65 x 184 x 55 cm (Photo: G. Younge)

For sale throughEverard Read Gallery – 011 788 4805 or 021 418 4527

Angola was the final horizon over which the terror of South African state militarism appeared. For thousands of young white conscripts, and their African opponents, it was also the scene of catastrophic emotional and physical wounding. Even today, a decade after the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, to say ‘Angola’ is to conjure up a time of pathological, horrific warfare exported to civilian populations, and in most conscripts, a profound, far-reaching guilt about their involvement in genocidal state aggression. Even for the most extreme South African officers, who completed their Angolan service with apparent relish, and for whom crossing the Cunene River was a first step towards later atrocities, Angola was debilitating.

Gavin Younge has concerned himself with the problem of violence and representation for almost two decades. As one of South Africa’s most innovative sculptors, he has explored the traces left by violence in society at large. In our country, it is as though a catastrophic wind has been blowing a long while, and we stand now in the eerie calm after its passing, confronting an endless, sandstone landscape of distorted Aeolian forms. For sculptors like Younge, representing the effects of this mutilating force requires a variety of expressive languages, and an indirectness of approach.- David Bunn.

Excerpt from Prosthesis—Artwork by Gavin Younge the Decade 1997–2007. La Noire Galerie, Paris. 2007, pp. 29–30.

CHEVAL DE BATAILLE   Forteresse de Salses 24/06/11 — 31/10/11

My project for the French Monuments Council (War Horse—Monuments and Animals) touched on three notions.

Firstly; skin, goat skins or vellum. In Africa, these animals have come to symbolize poverty, overcropping, and desertification.
Often their hides are marked by the scars and scratches imparted by barbed wire. The opaque and transparent areas furnish me with a sort of ‘underpainting’.

Secondly, the work addresses the idea of freedom. Here the animals have escaped their hunter or herdsmen, and fly out the embrasure.

Thirdly, the fortress, created for war between Spain and France in 1504, reminds us that war, violence, and oppression are still with us. Throughout the world, dictators and barbarians exist—the work insists that we pay attention, and remain vigilant.

 

«Marquées par son engagement contre l’apartheid, ses œuvres laissent entrevoir des parcelles de souffrance véhiculées par l’utilisation récurrent du vélin, métaphore du corps et de la peau où se lisent les plaies et cicatrices d’une société au douloureux passé.» Claude d’Anthenaise, Directeur, Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature à Paris.

 

The Foster Gang is  a collection of ‘fossil’ cameras in sculptural format. The son of a failed gold prospector himself, Young is intrigued by the web of deceit, intrigue and plain crookedness that built the City of Gold. This ‘family portrait’ of the infamous brigand and his associates, along with his vellum ‘bokkie’ Peggy (see below), points to a hominoid conundrum—are we the hunters, or the hunted?  ’This is Younge’s forté, to treat history as a story not yet fully told.’
Mark Read, Foreword, Gavin Younge [Cradle Snatcher], 2010.

Peggy. 2010. Vellum, resin cast, bamboo. 180 x 130 x 86 cm (Photo: G. Younge)

For sale through Everard Read Gallery – 011 788 4805 or 021 418 4527

Flight Delayed. 2010. Vellum, oxhide, plywood, styrofoam. 65 x 184 x 55 cm (Photo: G. Younge)

For sale throughEverard Read Gallery – 011 788 4805 or 021 418 4527

Angola was the final horizon over which the terror of South African state militarism appeared. For thousands of young white conscripts, and their African opponents, it was also the scene of catastrophic emotional and physical wounding. Even today, a decade after the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, to say ‘Angola’ is to conjure up a time of pathological, horrific warfare exported to civilian populations, and in most conscripts, a profound, far-reaching guilt about their involvement in genocidal state aggression. Even for the most extreme South African officers, who completed their Angolan service with apparent relish, and for whom crossing the Cunene River was a first step towards later atrocities, Angola was debilitating.

Gavin Younge has concerned himself with the problem of violence and representation for almost two decades. As one of South Africa’s most innovative sculptors, he has explored the traces left by violence in society at large. In our country, it is as though a catastrophic wind has been blowing a long while, and we stand now in the eerie calm after its passing, confronting an endless, sandstone landscape of distorted Aeolian forms. For sculptors like Younge, representing the effects of this mutilating force requires a variety of expressive languages, and an indirectness of approach.- David Bunn.

Excerpt from Prosthesis—Artwork by Gavin Younge the Decade 1997–2007. La Noire Galerie, Paris. 2007, pp. 29–30.

Excerpt: I Feel Therefore I Think

Goliath
Extending trauma studies into new territory, Jill Bennett proposes a philosophically informed way of engaging politically with traumatic feeling in visual art. She does not present a new philosophical theory of affect, but her mapping of observations from trauma studies onto Gilles Deleuze’s perspectives on art and thought is innovative. She draws first from Proust and Signs, in which the intellectual work of the poet is ranked above that of the philosopher. According to Deleuze, the philosopher reasons voluntarily and conventionally, thus conceiving only the possible, whereas the poet “scrutinizes the signs in which the truth betrays itself.” (2) The sensory impression (an affecting image encountered fortuitously in everyday life) or the “sensuous sign,” he contends, is the stimulus necessary to mobilize the involuntary ordering of faculties (memory, imagination, intelligence) that are involved in the creative process of art. Only this involuntary intellectual process, which is prompted by encounter with the sensuous sign, conceives “essences.” (3)

Positing that affect is also integral to the composition of the artwork, Bennett refers to Deleuze’s discussion of Francis Bacon’s painting, in Logic of Sensation. “Sensation is what is being painted,” Deleuze claims, “what is being painted on the canvas is the body, not insofar as it is represented as an object, but insofar as it is being experienced as sustaining this sensation” (37). Bennett relates this artistic experience of “painting sensation” to that of traumatic memory, which she says sustains sensation in the present, rather than speaking out of memory or experience. Although Deleuze is not particularly concerned with the aesthetic experience of the viewer, Bennett adopts his perspective on the “memory image” to explain the viewer’s aesthetic engagement, arguing that if art is a form of memory image, it can be understood as evoking “a memory for more than one subject, constituted through an engagement with differential positions, colliding in the present” (44-45). In this way, says Bennett, aesthetic encounter leads to a change in perception. She does not describe the process as reception, which suggests subjective interiorization, but concentrates on what affect does and the way it circulates intersubjectively. As she says, she derives theory from the visual, rather than applying theory to visual art. Importing a notion of empathy from trauma studies, Bennett introduces the term “empathic vision,” a way of seeing that emerges from the aesthetic encounter, which entails the conjunction of affective and critical operations.

Using examples of contemporary art produced in the wake of trauma that is suffered as a consequence of political or sexual violence, Bennett claims this art is “political” rather than “subjective”; it does not offer a privileged, interior view of the subject, but extends trauma into external space and “lived” place. Her examples include Gordon Bennett’s painting of Captain Cook pointing from Australia to the Twin Towers (Notes to Basquiat: The End of Irony, 2001), Gavin Younge’s installation of a circle of video-machine-laden bicycles recording his trip through Angola (Forces Favourites, 1997), and Paul Seawright’s “snapshot” photographs of places once traversed by Irish murder victims (Sectarian Murder Series, 1998). These works do not depict, explain, or reflect trauma. Rather, in an affecting way, they present visual signs that have metonymic connections to trauma, calling into the bodies and minds of viewers a sense of unease and awareness of trauma’s dissociating, haunting presence. Articulated in time, like traumatic memory, the art’s impact is often delayed or deferred, but the affective force of the aesthetic encounter lingers, bringing about sustained contemplation. Empathic vision is art’s self-reflexive way of engendering feeling for another and, simultaneously, forcing recognition of “an encounter with something irreducible and different, often inaccessible” (10). It is not only art’s way of processing the possibility of empathetic social relations in the world, but a mode of realizing this possibility in the aesthetic encounter, a method of transforming perception and contributing to thought. Above all, empathic vision is a “manner of doing politics” (152).

http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-5765824/I-Feel-Therefore-I-Think.html

accessed 24 July 2009
* Copyright © 2008, The Gale Group, a part of Cengage Learning, All Rights Reserved

Looped video showing Quagga Project; Gilets de Sauvetage; Natives to Police; Rooiland series; 28 series; Guns R Us; Daniel van Wyk.

Prices and info from Nathalie Miltat (contact@lanoiregalerie.fr)