CAROL‑ANNE GAINER, LEDELLE MOE, JANINA ERLICH

October 29, 1993

Gainer’s contribution to the exhibition included an experimental reworking of a painting that she had completed previously, as well as relief constructions built with objects attached to painted panels. This involved the exploration of what was for her both new imagery and new processes. Here surfaces were not only ‘painted’, but also ‘constructed’ with a wide range of raw materials that included resin-cast dried roses, photocopied text, and perspex sheets.
In the interview with MacKenny we discussed Gainer’s work:

Allen:      At the FLAT there was the idea that you had to do something different from your normal work. I remember that for this exhibition that she had reworked one of her old ‘brown’ landscapes with bright red paint – a very aggressive shift I think.
MacKenny:    I didn’t realise that she was using the resin-casts as early as this.
Allen:               That was a brand new piece. It was her most recent and it moved directly away from her landscape work.
MacKenny:    And in retrospect, not so directly though. Despite these early landscape works, the insertion of the Madonna here is the direction in which she then followed. Because from there on, with these roses embodied and so on, the things that she made, and that were attached to the canvas became more personalized. The landscape was out there…but the metaphor for the body was coming through. I remember wondering why she was applying these objects, but now it seems quite logical in terms of the direction that her work since then has taken. The body and the painting being a space in which you could imbed things. She undertook this lengthy process and it was also followed through in her first NSA show. Now I look at the last show she did where the body is absolutely primary, it is not covertly presented but rather overtly presented to the point where she displays herself naked. If you look at these sources I can see connections, though I did not realise that she was doing this so early. I think again for me, looking back at all these people, it is interesting to see that it was not just spurious work.[1]

Moe’s sculptures, removed from the gallery, became activated by being ‘on the street’ and constituted an action that was at that time illegal. Addressing the public in a very direct manner, Moe placed these ‘collapsed carcasses’ on the sidewalk in such a way that a passerby could not help but be confronted. In an interview with Moe she says:

Moe:                 I think we had the luxury of time then, though. I remember sitting on the balcony (for a number of days) and watching people passing by the sculptures on the pavement. And someone at 4am in the morning would trip over the leg and then curse and kick it. The public interaction with those pieces was very interesting.
Allen:               With the shift in government, the fact that you could just do that - leave the artwork on the pavement - we felt that there was a sense of lawlessness in the country. The police would not come and say: “What the hell is this in the street? Take it away!” There was that sense of freedom, that one could just do anything. If you wanted to exhibit in the street, then you just did it.[2]

Moe later recalled a comment by Art History lecturer Lola Frost, which seemed particularly significant to her own understanding of her use of the vulnerable creatures. Frost had commented that Moe’s previous work had dealt with confrontational images of aggressive animals, while this piece represented the victimized and defeated. Indeed one had the sense that these animals had been carelessly ‘discarded’. Opposite the prone animal figures across Mansfield Road, Moe situated another sculptural element that also spoke to issues of violence and injury. There she placed an enormous gun constructed from a street lamp pole. MacKenny and Moe discussed the sculpture and the importance of ‘extending’ the work into the street:

MacKenny:    I like that the outside of the FLAT also became part of its territory. And I think what is interesting is that it made the passer-by aware of something…it was like an intervention.
Moe:                 The weird thing about making things in South Africa at that time, was (for example with the “dead animals”) that rural people that saw it would say: “Oh, what is it? What kind of animal is it? It looks like a bloated sheep, but not really.” And they would automatically go into a very pragmatic, farm kind of analysis… “It looks like it swelled up and died, but how did it die?” They would get into the story of it and believe it. Across the road, on the opposite pavement, was the big gun…
MacKenny:    Wasn’t that a telephone pole?
Moe:                 Yes, the one night, I was driving around and I came across the fallen over telephone pole. Somehow or other, I managed to get it into the yellow panel van and drove it down to the sculpture department. I welded the gun butt onto it etc. And then Adrian and I took it up to the FLAT on a number of trolleys dragged behind the car. There is such a difference between the freedom we had on that strip – Mansfield Road – and any other road in Durban.
MacKenny:    As I said, what I find interesting is that the FLAT actually extended its exhibiting space outside of the cube. And in terms of the dead animals, I find them interesting, because you cannot (as the rural people were saying) identify what kind of animal they were. So you begin to have this amorphous identity, which allows for the metaphoric content to get broader. For me the power of these ‘beasts’ is that their sense of abandonment becomes more powerful when they are left on the streets.
Moe:                 I remember writing essays for Lola, about the victim and victor. And that was the first piece that was just complete defeat. It was a collapse.
MacKenny:    It is like road-kill.
Moe:                 They had died. They were gone.
MacKenny:    Except it leaves a feeling of before. It always has a before and an after. “Precisely what happened? How did they die”, you know. And because it was in a public site, I mean those photographs are great, precisely because people gather around. This is your gallery audience - anybody! Anybody, who walks the street. No body is going to walk past those things and a) miss them, or b) not pause to think, “What the fuck are these things doing here?” [1]