ZANDER BLOM PRESS COVERAGE

Sunday Independent
11 November, 2007

Artist walkabouts are all the rage.
Mary Corrigall joined one at the Rooke Gallery.



Newtown might be the cultural hub of Jozi but early on a rainy Saturday morning when we pull into Quinn Street it is deserted except for a man wrapped in plastic pulling a cart full of rubbish. Maybe it's the wet weather conferring a glossy lustre on the brick and concrete edifices or the effects of a 10-year gentrification process, but this one-time industrial part of Newtown is really beginning to look like the trendy post-industrial suburb it has aspired to be. It is the ideal setting for the Rooke Gallery, the newest addition to this arty locale. The Rooke Gallery has quite a different ambience to the cluster of art establishments along Jan Smuts Avenue. The industrial setting recalls cutting-edge galleries in New York's meat packing district or London's Shoreditch.

And, like any new progressive art gallery, the Rooke Gallery is promoting a relative newcomer to the South African contemporary art scene, Zander Blom. As this artist has been hailed as a "Bright Young Thing" for 2007 by Art South Africa magazine, I was keen to see whether he lived up to the title. I was also eager to hear Blom discuss his work during his walkabout.

As an art critic I have hitherto steered clear of artist walkabouts, preferring to let the art do the talking. Interacting with artists has also left me with the impression that they are more articulate in their chosen medium.

However, the artist walkabout has become such a popular addition to exhibition programmes in South Africa that I felt compelled to try out the experience. Where once only national galleries offered close encounters with artists, commercial galleries are now also providing opportunities for artists to interact with viewers of their work. The Goodman Cape Gallery runs art tours with every exhibition staged there. During the gallery's Loaded Lens group exhibition, a different photographer presented a talk on the work on display every Saturday.

"When Mikhael Subotszky did a tour, up to 75 people attended," gushes Emma Bedford, the director of the gallery. Seventy-five might not sound like an impressive attendance if one compares numbers with sport or theatre events but, for the visual arts, where crowds tend to gather only on opening nights, such support is an exciting development. It suggests a desire to comprehend the complex and furtive language of visual art production.

The visual arts have never been tailormade for the masses; the nature of art is such that, unless one is armed with an arsenal of knowledge, true appreciation remains an illusive pursuit. Though these walkabouts cannot furnish participants with the rudiments of art theory, it can give them insight into the artist's modus operandi.

Only 10 of us are gathered for Blom's tour. No doubt the wet weather has dampened others' interest. After a brief introduction from Gavin Rooke, the gallery owner, who is clearly an ardent fan, Blom takes centre stage. For a lanky, fresh-faced 20-something, Blom exudes a surprising amount of confidence and intelligence. He immediately commands attention; aside from the fact that he is easy on the eye, the concepts that inform his art are stimulating. He kicks off by telling us about his fascination for the way art is represented in books.

"This is how I have experienced art and modernism through photographs in books. I started to get interested in the difference between a photograph of an artwork and the artwork itself," he says.



Blom then recounts how, as a young artist living in South Africa, his grasp on modernism has been mediated, thus compounding his estrangement from this once avant-garde movement that turned the visual arts on its head at the turn of the last century.

His references to modernism are selfevident; using the walls and ceiling of his Brixton abode, Blom made bold experiments with form that mimic the art of the likes of Jackson Pollock and Piet Mondrian. These "experiments" are then photographed and, while they also appear in a book which he considers the final product, it is the photographs of his structural experiments that make up the exhibition. Blom explains that the artworks at this exhibition, entitled The Drain of Progress, are part of a process of trying to conjure up the experience of being the author of an avant-garde movement, thereby bridging the gap between the past and the here and now.

If anyone in our group believed art to facilitate the sensual engagement with reality, Blom's detached tone and explanations quickly make it clear that his art is an intellectual pursuit - the magnetism of the visuals is almost incidental.

Almost, because as Blom takes us on the tour, starting with the first artwork he made in the series, it becomes obvious that as he has been refining his expression and the visual impact of his imagery has become more potent as he has developed the idea further.

"I wanted to push the documentation process - I wanted to make my photographs more than just snaps," he explains. Standing in front of the first artwork which marks the beginning of his "process", he draws our attention to the text it contains.

"Clement Greenberg, like man he was god to us," is written on a piece of paper glued to a wall that Blom has photographed. "This is a joke," he points out. Blom has no reverence for this influential American art critic who set out strict criteria as to what characterised abstract expressionism, the American branch of modernism. Sending-up Greenberg is important to Blom's process, from the postmodernists' perspective, Greenberg's dogma has no relevance.

Blom makes no effort to dumb-down the concepts that his work expresses. Perhaps that is because his work defies simplification; it is the sum of many parts that are interlinked or run parallel to each other. Though I usually stare at an artwork until its essence comes into focus, I bombard Blom with questions instead, trying to discover what makes him tick. The rest of the tour group are unresponsive; they look at him blankly and I sense that much of what he has said has yet to sink in.

There are moments of greater clarity when he presents his ideas in a succinct statement such as: "It is about my loss of faith in progress."

By the time we are standing in front of his final artwork, which signals the completion of his process, we don't need Blom to tell us that his desire to recapture the spirit of modernism has not been successful. Though there are strong visual cues linking his art to that groundbreaking art movement, it is layered with references to another time and place; Blom cannot transcend the present and the thinking that defines it.

"It was doomed from the start," he says. Blom points at the black holes that dominate his final pieces. "It's like the existentialist void."

Blom doesn't employ this term needlessly. Having eschewed the modernists who indirectly laid the foundations of his art, he is fully aware of the precarious position his work occupies; it reaches towards something that no longer exists. When the tour ends, I am dazzled by Blom's art; it is novel yet it resonates with our Zeitgeist.

For information about artist walkabouts at Rooke Gallery call 072-658-0762 or visit www.rookegallery.com.



Business Day
Quarterly Art Supplement
December 2007

Slacker art, with slick execution
By Sean O'Toole



IT's not just the way he wears his pants that makes me think Zander Blom is a slacker - an eminently likeable one, let me qualify. Writing in a catalogue published to coincide with his recent solo exhibition at Rooke Gallery, the 25-year-old Pretoria Tech graduate describes how moving into a digs in Brixton, Joburg, became the catalyst for a period of idle retreat from the art world.

Early in 2005, while mucking about with his ink and paper creations for a small group exhibition, Blom realised most of his youthful ambitions were "lame and redundant". He also recognised his dislike of "ambitious art" - being art that is "monumental or profound".

So he decided to spend more time at home.

"It was about living and working, about appreciating literature, music and art as much as it was about producing my own pointless scribbles," writes Blom in his catalogue, titled The Drain of Progress. "I was quite happy to lock myself up in my house and make random marks and words on paper."

Towards the end of last year the first bits of creative evidence from Blom's exile began to appear in the public realm. Blom's first prominent outing was a solo exhibition of mostly graphics at The Premises gallery in Johannesburg. Not long afterwards he exhibited 10 photographs on a group show at the same venue, on a show sponsored by dealer Gavin Rooke's Society of Photographers.

The photographs were homages to creative idleness, depicting his Brixton living space, an alien environment cluttered with Blom's monochromatic drawings, prints, linear cutouts and graffiti. While references to German artist Kurt Schwitters's fabled '30s studio space are unavoidable, Blom's messy universe is also thoroughly his own. "For a long time I aspired to make the kind of immaculately crafted work in media that would last forever," he says in his catalogue. "When I killed that ambition a big weight was lifted off my shoulders."



Given his interest in process rather than product, photography is a logical vehicle, offering a means to record the strange and often fleeting manifestations of artistic consciousness that occupy his home.

Fast-forward to October 2007. Blom is conducting a walkabout of his Rooke Gallery exhibition. It is a curious show, lavishly priced photographs of his home environment presented alongside a messy installation that recreates what he once exclusively did in the privacy of his home. Almost everything is for sale.

"A lot of this stuff is supposed to be kinda funny," Blom says in his soft-spoken manner. He has just been explaining the meaning of a simple hand-lettered poster reading, "Clement Green/berg/Like, man. He/was god to us." No one laughs.

Perhaps it is the obtuse singularity of his vision that is uninviting of laughter, or the grim spectacle of a smart-Alec tripping himself up in public. Having dedicated himself to mischievous play and nonsense - "Cutting up nature, and revolting against her bourgeois sensibility!" he declared in December 2006 - here we find the artist participating in a polite market economy, gallery walkabout and all.



What's happened? Why suddenly the monumental photographs?

"I want these works to be seen as paintings, or as compositions, rather than as photographs," he responds, sounding eerily like a producer of ambitious art. "What I am doing is constructing these compositions, and then I am just framing them. It is kinda like using my house as the canvas … I am just framing my paintings in a different way."

"Why don't you exhibit your house then?" asks a curious member of the public.

"Well, I guess I could," Blom concedes. "The work is vastly more interesting than if you do see the house." He points to his photographs: "These aren't the house; it is me framing the house in an interesting way. If you go into the house you will definitely not have the same experience."

All this wrangling over the monumental qualities of the photographs tends to overlook a basic insight: he is a polished artist. "I think he masters his own aesthetic," says Justin Rhodes, of What If The World gallery. "It is very identifiable and strong, well thought-out and conceived, not just edgy graphic imagery."



And he has skills beyond graphics and photography. Earlier this year Blom released a CD of glitchy electronic compositions. Then there are his middle-finger salutes to art history as one-third of the prankster art collective, Avant Car Guard.

It all adds up to suggest the arrival of an embryonic talent, sagging jeans and all.



ARTthrob
September 2007

Interview with Zander Blom on the occasion of his exhibition, 'The Drain of Progress'
by Michael Smith

Artist Zander Blom has a show up at the Rooke Gallery in Newtown during October, cryptically entitled 'The Drain of Progress'. The exhibition represents Blom's exploration of Modernism from a South African context, and consists in equal measure of prints, framed paper constructions and one-off photographs of odd constructions created in spaces inside his Brixton home. I interviewed him at the gallery a week into this powerful show.

Michael Smith: What is it about Modernism that you're interested in interrogating or unpacking?

Zander Blom: I'm interested in exploring some aspects of the avant garde art movements of the 20th Century that I find compelling. Examples of this include the super optimism, idealism and seriousness of Mondrian and De Stijl, the striving towards revolution and progress that characterises movements like Constructivism, and the glorification of modernisation which Futurism is know for. My exploration has to do with trying to understand Modernism from the perspective of a young person living in Johannesburg, South Africa, at the dawn of the 21st Century - a position which is very much dislocated in time, space, and ideology from what it attempts to investigate. The works which I made in the last four years either directly mimic selected visual qualities of modernist related subjects, or comment in some way on the various ideologies of art movements of the 20th Century.

MS: There seems to be an aesthetic of messiness, stains, bits of tape left on walls, scratches, even motifs seemingly seeping out of your ceilings in some photographs. This is at odds with the clinical nature of some Modernism, particularly work by Mondrian.

ZB: Regardless of whether the work I'm referencing is clean or messy - Pollock's for example are generally very messy, while something from De Stijl is usually very clinical - in my case it's about bringing it back to: 'This is where I live, this is where I eat, sleep, and make work, this is the position from which I'm exploring these things, a very confined space with a limited budget, and limited access to the work that I'm exploring.' I live in an old house in Brixton. If I'm reconstructing a Mondrian composition on the stained pressed ceiling in my bedroom with vinyl tape and black paint or ink, from faded colour plate reproductions, then it's going to have a certain kind of inglorious, un-glamorous look to it.

MS: In a number of the works, photographs and drawings, there seems to be an interest in the accumulation of identical units into a whole: this suggests the Postmodern impulse detectable in much Pop Art. How does that fit into your programme?

ZB: To me shapes like the target, the dolphin and the log of wood are about having a unit with which to construct different compositions. In most cases I'm trying to nullify their original meanings and create a sort of formalist abstraction from them.

That said, because I'm attempting to make very formalist or modernist compositions, but the seriousness, optimism and the ideals of progress which fueled modernism are replaced with pseudo-nihilism, a demise of seriousness, and a sense of irony, these compositions become more like Postmodern voids than anything else.

In the case of the target specifically, I wanted very much to reclaim the shape from the association with Pop Art, and turn it into a formalist composition simulating a wormlike void.

MS: I notice that a number of images, paintings, drawings etc that appear in your photographs are also placed loose and unframed in the gallery space.

ZB: Yes, some of these works have been framed and isolated so one is able to view them as important pieces, but I also wanted to show some of them in a way that was more in touch with the method of their production and the purpose they have as props in the narrative that is communicated by the photographs.

The book and a big part of the exhibition comprise photographs that were taken in my home. Apart from communicating the exploration into modernism, which is effectively the underlying theme of this body of work, with it I wanted the photographs to be considered completed works, rather than snaps of my home, or what I was making. Basically, with the layout of the exhibition I wanted to treat some things as museum pieces, and others as props or debris.

MS: In one of your works one of the base units from which you construct the image is a swastika: what is your thinking behind this choice?

ZB: In the context of my show the swastika is the same as a dolphin or a target: it's a shape that I find quite beautiful, one I have used as the basis to explore different compositions. I use it in spite of its connotations of 'evil' and 'death', which I'm still sensitive to, but I'm trying to rid these shapes of their moral content and use them for their visual qualities in constructing formalist compositions.

I am not interested in making works that deal with violence, or that rely solely on shock value.

MS: The catalogue raisonné that forms part of this show is an interesting document. Could you tell me about it?

ZB: The book is designed to mimic the type of catalogue raisonné which one associates with an accomplished modernist artist from Europe or North America. The kind of publication that it mimics has been my main source of reference to the art history subjects I was exploring, so I wanted the works I produced to be viewed within a similar frame. Another aspect of it is that I wanted to mimic the colour plate reproductions which these kinds of books feature, and elevate the documentation of artworks or artist studios to works of art. Thus instead of having a book that features photographs of my work, I made a book where the photographs of my works are effectively the works. The remnants from installations in my home, or paintings and drawings are things that I also consider artworks, but in a way where they function more as props in a narrative which the book and photographs convey.

The book features a concise introduction to my practice, then 74 photographic works which were produced over a period of four years, and then follows with explanatory text on individual pieces. It is produced in a limited edition of 300, and is to be understood as an editioned artwork, rather than a catalogue of work. All the photographs featured in the book exist as one-off large-scale photographic works.


Art South Africa
Summer 2007 edition

Title: Drain of Progress
Review by: Mary Corrigall

Blom is fixated on photographic representations of art; it is the medium through which most aspiring South African artists have come into contact with art's canon. So while the formalist renditions that feature in his photographs appear to be the primary subject of his photography it is the catalogue that is the focus of his art. He is mimicking the art of representing art. For Blom the act of mediation is the authentic moment of creative invention and the physical artworks featured in the photographs become the props or as Blom dubs them "the debris". Although Blom says that his approach does not undermine or devalue the art object, any form of mediation will unavoidably reposition or redefine the status of the artworks he photographs. Any subject of a photograph is open to manipulation, and therefore intrinsically surrenders its agency or ability to define itself.



Some photographs are more visually stimulating than others as Blom's focus shifts from creating subjects - makeshift recreations of modernist art - to mediating his work via photography. However, no single artwork at Blom's exhibition definitively expresses his ethos. Reminiscent of the 'artworks' which featured at Stephen Hobbs and Marcus Neustetter's UrbaNET Hillbrow-Dakar-Hillbrow exhibition held earlier this year at the University of Johannesburg, Blom's artworks/photographs simply document and substantiate a process, rather than functioning as traditional self-contained art objects. In this context Blom's art is the residue of a procedure, a visual reference of a trajectory of thoughts. Of course, this subverts the idealised notion that iconoclastic artistic statements can be realised in one single form of expression.



Blom mimics formalist designs but it is clear from the onset that he holds little reverence for modernism. His process is superficially centred on trying to recapture the spirit of modernism and its core impulse - to reinvent aesthetics - because all the while Blom is aware from the start that he cannot recapture the sense of naivety and heightened appetite for discovery of that bygone era. In this way modernism is no longer an aesthetic philosophy but a set of ideas that are innately tied to a specific time frame.
Nevertheless Blom tries to 'leap' outside of his milieu. He aims to show the futility of seeking out a unique visual syntax and, in a universal context, connecting with ideas/events that have passed.
Blom's journey of exploration is almost scientific as inferred by the titles, which relay the specifics such as 11.36, Tuesday, 12 December 2006, and denoted by the manner in which he mediates his own experience/art. Just as the pressed ceiling of his bedroom serves as a visual marker of the setting that Blom is rooted in, the titles also prove that it is impossible for Blom to escape his environment.
His grasp on key moments in art history are tainted by his knowledge of the present; he cannot obliterate his post-modernist stance. What was once avant garde is now mundane, rendering Jackson Pollock or Piet Mondrian's visual "inventions" everyday imagery. The banal, detached titles articulate Blom's dispassionate connection with the modernist masterpieces he is recreating. His desire to retrace the actions of the modernist masters is not propelled by curiosity but appears more like a mechanical deed; Blom is simply going through the motions without being genuinely invested in the recreations of these masterpieces, further underpinning his cynicism.



Blom is reflecting on the achievements of the modernists from a time in place where the invention of a novel visual idiom appears beyond reach and is no longer of significance; artists are no longer concerned with reconfiguring or reinventing representations of form.
Despite Blom's genuine disconnection from art's canon it is obvious that he is still subject to its influence, he cannot divorce himself from the modernist tradition; it is the bridge between his current preoccupations and the past. And that link cannot be severed; knowledge cannot be erased.
Although 'sensational' is commonly employed by critics to describe a theatrical experience, Blom's 'theatre', replete with props from arts canon is just that. His brand of photography further pushes the boundary between art and photography and will likely, and in the years to come give the likes of Roger Ballen and Pieter Hugo et al a run for their money.