An Art of Nothing, an Art of Something: The Local in the Global or the Global in the Local?

Abstract

The solo exhibition, Nothing Matters, was installed on the mezzanine floor of an industrial panel beater warehouse at 400 Sydney Road, Durban, South Africa. The exhibition was open to the public from September-December 2021. The objective of the exhibition was to create ‘something’ of conceptual and aesthetic compulsion from a language of nothingness, whether it is ‘found’ in the surrounding temper of the public space or, in art, in various manifestations of the ‘dematerialised object’: the void; the empty canvas or gallery; the ‘invisible’ work; or the detritus of the everyday? The following is a dialogue between literary critic Michael Chapman and artist Greg Streak regarding the exhibition.

Keywords:

• nothingness in art
• local
• global
• truth-telling

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Michael Chapman is a leading literary critic whose publications include Southern African Literatures (1996) and, most recently, On Literary Attachment in South Africa: Tough Love (2022). His collection of essays, Art Talk, Politics Talk (2006), includes ‘The Artist and the Citizen: Complimenting/Complementing Andries Botha’.

2 Art Talk, Politics Talk (2006), includes ‘The Artist and the Citizen: Complimenting/Complementing Andries Botha’.

3 Ricky Burnett’s Tributaries exhibition and catalogue in 1985 (a new inclusive take on contemporary South African art), Gavin Younge’s Art of the South African Townships in 1988, Steven Sack’s The Neglected Tradition in 1989, Sue Williamson’s Resistance Art in South Africa 1990 and Williamson’s co-authored Art in South Africa: the future present with Ashraf Jamal in 1996.

4 The South African visual art environment in the early 2000s, still somewhat euphoric of a new dispensation, is possibly best represented and distilled in the publication 10 Years, 100 Artists: Art in a Democratic South Africa (2004), edited by Sophie Perryer, in which a selection of my work appears. Yet by the term ‘democratic’ had begun to lose its confident attachment to the hopes of a ‘new’ nation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Greg Streak

Greg Streak is a lecturer in Fine Arts at the Durban University of Technology. He is an interdisciplinary practitioner working in sculpture, video, installation, and documentary filmmaking. He completed his practice-based PhD in Visual and Performing Arts in 2021. Streak sees the practice of art as a form of critical inquiry, a conceptually reflective research.