PIERS MANSFIELD

May 6, 1994

 

Piers Mansfield, a fourth year student at the Technikon, presented an installation which resembled a stage set for a detective’s office. Hinted in the invitation that he produced to announce the exhibition (a photocopied cheap Agatha Christie paperback cover: Poirot ‑ and the Case of the Murdered Millionaire), Mansfield created a melancholic mood with props, lighting and music.
In the corner of the otherwise empty room, was a wooden desk with a chair. On the wall were hung an old wind up telephone, a fire extinguisher, a baroque mirror and a framed portrait of John F. Kennedy. A bare ceiling lamp hung above the scene and the music of Ornette Coleman set the mood. Inside the desk drawer could be found a spy novel.
It was a detective’s office that seemed to reference several decades of American popular culture: from film noir movies of the 1940s and cartoon characters like “Dick Tracey”, to ‘cold war’ spy hideouts; the setting evoked rich associations.
The mood was dark, the presentation austere: a few bare objects, a harsh light bulb. Indeed, the real detective work lay in the hands of the viewer, for the ‘clues’ and the ‘script’ were not explicitly stated. The work did not offer conclusions, but rather more sinisterly revealed how we, as young South Africans, were so often preoccupied with and influenced by American culture through the popular media of television, movies and comics. It brought to mind the question of why Mansfield, a South African, might use imagery that so strongly referenced ‘American’ history, implying that we were now engaged in an ‘international’ conversation rather than a local one. In a more subversive, subtle way Mansfield grappled with the strange displacement of American culture onto a South African context.