SHOW NO PAIN

The collected films of Michael MacGarry 1999 – 2017

Solo exhibition
02 May – 28 June 2017
WITS Art Museum (WAM)

SHOW NO PAIN is a survey show of Michael MacGarry’s film and video work from early animations as a student in 1999 through to a purpose-made two-channel film installation titled Parang (2017), focused on the artist’s family history in the Far East. The exhibition consists of ten works across short film, animation and feature-length video installation as well as text-based works describing films the artist has never made.

The exhibition is built around several recurring themes in the artist’s filmic oeuvre. Notably: the interrogation of Modern architecture; historical cinematic representations of Africa; man and landscape; notions of entropy and the concept of eternal recurrence.

Agency and Amor Fati
– Chris Thurman

In MacGarry’s film LHR-JNB, the title alludes to the flight from Heathrow airport to Johannesburg – and in particular to a fictional 747 plane carrying, MacGarry imagines, “numerous versions of myself: young, educated, white, middle-class South Africans returning home from London – some with saved money, others with property in England and most with one eye on their return ticket”. After crash-landing in the Mediterranean, a handful of survivors struggle to stay afloat on a leaking life raft.

Their fate is, however, sealed; as MacGarry explains in the accompanying text, they have already “chosen to be isolated and adrift as participants in the South African brain-drain”, and when they eventually succumb to the waves this is nothing more than “the metaphoric drowning of their vague identities” as semi-expats. LHR-JNB avoids the charge of narcissism by explicitly opposing these doomed figures both to art historical precursors (unlike the occupants of the boats in Rembrandt’s Christ in the Storm on the Lake of Galilee and Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, they are not to be spared) and to the twenty-first century ‘boat people’ traveling in the other direction across the Mediterranean, from north Africa to southern Europe (as ‘awkward colonials’, the white sort-of-South-Africans in MacGarry’s life raft are neither “plausible as ‘boat people’ nor are they convincing in their claims to be economic refugees"). Migration, forced or otherwise, is a key concern in MacGarry’s work. The plight of African refugees and immigrants in Europe is expressed in Sea of Ash, at the end of which the protagonist disappears into the Venetian lagoon – ironically, like his counterparts in LHR-JNB, trying to make his way home to Africa. Another sea voyage is the premise of As Above, So Below. Here, MacGarry dabbles in alternative history. It is 1836, and Charles Darwin lands at the Cape of Good Hope. Instead of spending an unremarkable fortnight in Cape Town, however (as the historical Darwin did), this Darwin goes missing – takes flight – after mysterious encounters on the beach, and the colonial adventurer disappears from (European) view. This micro-plot, in turn, almost inevitably calls to mind that ur-narrative of the ‘white male in Africa’ gone wrong: Heart of Darkness. Joseph Conrad’s novella and its various filmic iterations are an abiding interest of MacGarry’s, culminating in the current exhibition in Death From Above. MacGarry returns to the kaleidoscopic technique he has previous employed with this material, fragmenting and reconstituting the ever-problematic text itself as well as its echoes in Frances Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979).

SHOW NO PAIN is, in many ways, an almost Oedipal killing-off of such iconic literary and filmic precursors (the same applies to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film version, which are intertextual signposts in MacGarry’s Sea of Ash). But it is also a form of tribute, and indeed of reinvigoration: MacGarry’s The Battles is an attempt to breathe new life into Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), which is based on the Algerian war.

Such points of reference may seem at odds with another important aspect of MacGarry’s oeuvre, which is modern(ist) architecture. Yet even in short pieces such as Reclining Figure, 1959 and The Healthy World of Primitive Building Methods – which playfully deconstruct photographs of building interiors and exteriors – the intersection of the architectural and the political is implicit. It is made explicit in Flies., another of the mini-narrative works, this one set in an abandoned skyscraper, where personal tragedy and national socio-economic phenomena (crime, urban dereliction) collide. In the spectacular emptiness of its setting, Flies. has a counterpart in Excuse Me, While I Disappear., which plays out in a ghost Chinese development near Luanda, Angola.

Finally, there is the two-channel piece Parang, which weaves together all of these strands into an autobiographical account connecting MacGarry’s father – an architect – to his artist son and to buildings that are a part of their family history, from Singapore to South Africa. Matching this multi-generational archive is footage showing the life cycle of the silk worm: birth, growth, mating and death, endlessly repeated. If the silk worm suggests a reductio ad absurdum of the ‘eternal recurrence', then the father-and-son dynamic suggests not only continuity but also change – that is, agency. Although a number of the films in SHOW NO PAIN have fatal and fated endings, as an artist MacGarry is not limited to Nietzsche’s amor fati (love of destiny). On the contrary, he is shown carving out a place in the world even as his identity places limitations upon this process; and his viewers, one feels, may leave this exhibition encouraged to do the same.