ADRIAN HERMANIDES

Forecast of Human Trembling

February 25, 1994

Exhibition Poster 1994

Installation could be seen as a kind of counter strategy to painting and sculpture. The openness of the FLAT programming, which gave an opportunity for an artist or artists to control the space in whatever way the work demanded, led to the extensive exploration of this art form. Indeed, many of the students and other artists who exhibited at the FLAT came to the space with a history in more traditional genres and soon began to stretch their work in the face of these open possibilities. This ‘stretch’ interestingly involved not only expanding the sculptural object ‘in space’, to create environments or site specific displays, but also ‘in time’ through the medium of video and performance.
An interesting experiment in combining both was explored in the exhibitions of Adrian Hermanides and Ledelle Moe. The two had begun a conversation about the possibility of bringing ‘live people’ into their work, and this led to two separate solo exhibitions, scheduled within a few weeks of each other. Here, the artists used these ‘live people’ (as they described them) as ‘figurative’ elements in their respective installations, but in two very distinctly different ways. Of concern to each was not merely the idea of using a human figure as a formal device, but as a possible means to express their frustration with the lack of confrontational, political and sexual issues being made in much of the art in Durban at that time.
Of course this idea of expanding the format of art making was not a new one. Kurt Schwitters, working in the 1930s, built his Merzbau, which is seen by many historians as a precedent for installation. Indeed it is mentioned in the ‘genealogy’ of two important books both: Performance - Live Art 1909 to the present,[1] and Installation Art.[2] However, this ‘grandfather of expanded sculptural space’ also conceptualized the idea of the Merzbuhne, or total theater. Though unrealized it is important in that he suggested the possibility for the human figure to also behave as a formal element in installation. He says:

All solid, liquid, gaseous bodies such as white wall, man barbed wire entanglement, blue distance…surfaces that fold like curtains, or shrink…everything from the hairnet of the high-class lady to the SS leviathen. Even people can be used – people can even be tied to backdrops.[3]

Hermanides’ interest in installation and ‘live sculptures’ produced Forecast of Human Trembling. Accompaning the exhibition were five full colour and numerous black and white posters, which included not only the suggestive title, but the even more provocative question:

For some, sex before marriage is immoral. What do you call sex before kindergarten? [4]

The poster shows two photos of a young boy, with a red strip covering his eyes and a center image of pots and pan.
The installation was a kind of ‘still-life’, which utilized the entire room, and spoke of boys’ schools and adolescent male sexuality. It was constructed with a number of elements. Hermanides painted the entire room blue (to the dismay of our landlord) and divided the space with six or seven school lockers, also painted blue. Inside each locker were articles of clothing. These transformed clothing items included a jacket, which had been covered with slices of polony, making it pink with the appearance of flesh, a hat carefully covered in mincemeat and boots covered in mashed potatoes. Frost, who came to the exhibition, commented on these elements, in our recent interview.

Well as you were talking about the mash-potatoe on the hat, I couldn’t help but think of spunk. Semen! That’s my thought for the day. But I have to say that Adrian’s work always has this devious excess. I always get excited about his work. But it was always an understated camp… I can’t help but see these things on clothing as bodily productions. And all that mash-potatoe and mince-meat has a lot to do with school dinners. Which is to situate the boys within an institutional framework and bodily ingestion, and by extension, bodily expulsion.[5]

A tight space was formed by the placement of the lockers. Near the door was a lit Cadac gas burner continuously boiling a pot of eggs; cooking these until they burst. The only lighting was a red globe, which lent an eerie hue to the ‘scene’. The stove with the boiling eggs raised the temperature of the room. Hung on two walls were chairs bolted at heights of approximately 2 – 3 meters, and on these raised chairs sat 16 year old, blonde-haired boys dressed in their school trying to find my way into that particular piece. I was thinking about the Rebecca Horn piece in the 1992 Documenta. The one with the school tables on the ceiling. For me the parallel is something about the fixity - the fact that the kids are on the walls. In the Rebecca Horn piece the desks are on the ceilings. But the sense that the figure is displaced, it is out of its natural habitat, it is not on the ground. In that sense, despite the fact that they are not bound, they are trapped in some kind of way. And this comes back to the feeling I had of oppression. It was very hot in there, the locker evoked the kind of army locker, the fact that you opened these things and found…meat. For me there was a very strong sense that the boys were being processed. Process - processed meat. That would probably be the strongest analogy through out that piece. Containment and the idea of cooking. Preparing and oppression. People being placed into these hot, narrow spaces and the products – the blazers, the hats… I think whether done consciously or instinctively the major metaphor there seems to be some kind of processing in an oppressive way.

ADRIAN HERMANIDES detail from 'Forecast of Human Trembling' 1994

ADRIAN HERMANIDES detail from 'Forecast of Human Trembling' 1994

Moe:                 I think something interesting about the experimental approach of having two days to set up and work with a project – the opening becomes the third day extension of what you have been working with for two days. After Adrian had painted the walls, and then screwed the chairs to the walls, there was an element of time to it, the meat started rotting, the eggs were boiling. The boys couldn’t sit up there for two long. So time was an essence. Instead of “you make the object, crate it and send it somewhere” there’s this fleeting moment of stuff.
MacKenny:    Except the fleeting moment makes you feel like it is interminable.[1]

It was significant, that although Hermanides was not a performer, the installation had a distinctly autobiographical tone. The boys were invited by him from his old school, Westville Boys High; the uniforms they wore were like ones he had once worn. The symbology, although personal and obscure, made reference to adolescent male sexuality, with such loaded signs as coats that transformed the wearer into ‘meat’, cooking ‘eggs’ (testicles) and boys held in suspension. All were part of a ‘still life’ brimming with sexual innuendo.

RoseLee Goldberg, in her book on Performance Art, describes the use of performers as live sculptural elements in formal poses as tableaux vivants. She describes how the artist, Jannis Kounellis, presented works which “combined animate and inanimate sculpture”:

Table (1973), consisted of a table strewn with fragments from an ancient Roman Apollo sculpture next to which a man sat, an Apollo mask held to his face. According to Kounellis, this and several other untitled ‘frozen performances’- some of which included live horses - were means of illustrating metaphorically the complexity of ideas and sensations represented in art throughout art history. He considered the Panthenon frieze as such a ‘frozen performance’. Each sculpture or painting in the history of art, he said, contained ‘the story of the loneliness of a single soul’ and his tableaux attempted to analyze the nature of that ‘single vision’.[2]

Tableaux, as a performance genre, though avant-garde in its contemporary applications, is rooted in tradition. Indeed there existed in the nineteenth century a performative genre known as tableau vivant (literally “living pictures”), where popular masterpiece paintings or sculptures were enacted. Even earlier ‘performances’ took place in eighteenth century Italy where poses of classical statuary were mimicked.[3] It is a genre which can be unexpected when encountered in a sculptural installation, like Hermanides’ Forecast for Human Trembling, and yet it is familiar within the realm of popular culture.
In an ordinary South African community one might encounter a ‘Nativity Scene’ cast not with plaster statues, but live performers. Or the ‘scenes from the Gospels’, where members of a congregation pose and personify the characters from religious text.
This traditional ‘play with one scene’ was explored by many performance artists working in the 70s. In Real Dream (1976), the artist Colette lay naked in a luxurious crushed silk environment for a “sleep tableaux lasting several hours” at the Clocktower in New York. British artists Gilbert and George, stood on gallery pedestals as part of their Living Scupture works (1969 - 71).[4] Another, Scott Burton’s Pair Behavior Tableaux (1976), is described by Goldberg:

…two male performers, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, was an hour long performance composed of approximately eighty static poses held for a number of seconds each. Viewed from a distance of twenty yards the figures looked deceptively sculpture-like.” [5]

In an essay on the work of Ann Hamilton, an artist who often employs a human element in her complex installation, Buzz Spector uses a term - witness - to describe the function of live performers and goes on to write about her use of ‘live people’ in her installations:

Standing still or otherwise engaged in repetitive tasks, this human element encourages viewers to more fully experience the circumstances of the installation. The people in Hamilton’s installations often suffer their siuations in silence.[6]

Indeed Hermanides included ‘actors’ in an installation that behaved like a single scene from a dramatic production. They were still and silent like statues. Significant was the fact that the boys did not interact with the public, or for that matter acknowledge anyone around them, and therefore created a dramatic tension.

The show was well attended[7], and Marianne Meijer would write in her column the following week these words:

‘ALTERNATVE’ VENUE FOR ARTISTS
The FLAT Gallery is now well established as a place for young artists, who are dead serious about their work. With last week’s installation piece by Adrian Hermanides titled “Forecast of Human Trembling” the gallery proved once more it’s ready to give a much‑needed injection of alternative subculture into Durban’s dwindling mainstream.[8]