Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho are fed up with the commercial gallery system, even though both of them would do exceptionally well at it if they had to (it must be stated at the outset that Mokgotho sort of already is — he had his first solo exhibition, “Someday Today” at Michael Stevenson’s Side Gallery in June 2010). “Too many a time artists are held ransom to the demands of their art communities and those communities’ museum practices, which often suppress true artistic experimentation and expression in favour of work for commercial consumption,” goes the official rant on the Facebook page for their latest exhibition event, Gazart II, which opens this Saturday night at Main Street Life.
Moiloa and Mokgotho make up the artist’s collective MADEYOULOOK, and Gazart is a model of exhibition-making which MADEYOULOOK has devised as an alternative to curatorial conventions established by art museums and commercial galleries. The idea, Moiloa and Mokgotho say, is based on the loxion (location/township) colloquialism “gazat”, which is a word for a communal ethos in which members of a group all chip in to realise a particular goal. That goal may be lunch, for example, in which case each person in a group who plans to share a meal will contribute however much money they can towards it. In MADEYOULOOK’s case, the goal is an exhibition. Applied in this context, the gazat concept means that each artist does whatever he or she can, in addition to making a work, to help with the production of the exhibition. A media-savvy member of the team will handle the Facebook page, for example, and a stickler for numbers will do the budget.
The first Gazart exhibition took place in October 2010 at the old Roka space at 44 Stanley, before Pirelli and bakery Vovo Telo moved in.
Jeremy Wafer firing a paintball rifle at Murray Turpin’s work on the first Gazart exhibition in October 2009
Although the premise of Gazart takes a slightly simplistic view of mainstream exhibition-making, particularly in collapsing museum and commercial gallery practice, the effort is admirable as it really does seem to give artists some independence from sponsors and imperatives to sell. Eventually though, for the model to be anything other than a springboard to whiter, more cube-shaped spaces, it will have to make some money.
Until then, though, MADEYOULOOK is revelling in the delicious reactionary energy Gazart is drumming up, and is inviting us all to come along. Moiloa and Mokgotho see Gazart as a template to be applied freely by other artists, and have even offered to share their manifesto with interested parties.
Don’t miss the opening of Gazart II at Main Street Life, August 21 from 7pm. After the exhibition, there will be a party on the rooftop of Main Street Life. The cover charge for the after party is R10.