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Anthea Moys

At my own risk

JOHANNESBURG6 Jellicoe Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196

Private Bag 5 Parklands 2121 South-AfricaTel: + 27 11 788 4805 Fax: + 27 11 788 5914 Email: gallery@everard.co.za www.everard-read.co.za

CAPE TOWN3 Portswood Road, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town

Tel: + 27 21 418 4528 Email: ctgallery@everard.co.za www.everard-read-capetown.co.za

The Brait-Everard Read Art Award 2009

At my own risk

Anthea Moys

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Anthea Moys – At my own risk 3The Brait-Everard Read Art Award 2009

Anthea Moys at risk in Johannesburg

It’s a gorgeous spring day in Johannesburg

in 2006. South Africa’s famous annual cy-

cle race, the 94.7 Cycle Challenge, is in full

swing and Jan Smuts Avenue pumps with

the energy of cyclists and supporters. The

finish line is the goal for everyone. There

is one exception. This cyclist won’t be go-

ing anywhere because she rides an exercise

bike, a heavy metal stationary machine.

But she seems oblivious to her fate. Sport-

ing the full outfit of her competitors, she

peddles like mad. Some supporters yell,

‘Where are your wheels?’ and ‘Fucking los-

er!’ Others feel sorry for her and offer food

and drink. She looks steadfastly ahead.

This is Anthea Moys’ performance-piece

94.7 Cycle Challenge. The whole scene

constitutes the work, for Anthea’s practice

is action through intervention and interac-

tion. For this she needs more than an au-

dience. Her fellow cyclists and supporters

become players in her work. The physical

setting has its way too.

Anthea needs the race and all it signifies

to reveal the goallessness of the play that

drives her. For her, and indeed others of like

mind, we generally lack this kind of play in

our consumer society. Our play is dominated

by the functionalism and utilitarianism of

capitalism: a controlled release from the

pressures of the workplace, calculated to

refresh us in fuelling our economic drive.

Sport is sanctioned play. Its elaborate scor-

ing systems, rules and conventions reflect

something of the constraints and competi-

tiveness of our larger world. But it also offers

other dynamics that Anthea likes to tap.

What is it, then, that interests Anthea

about pointless play? She says that ‘it’s

about being in the present moment and

not thinking of what came before or what

will come after’. Later, she adds, ‘It’s also

about communing with others.’ I am inter-

ested in this ‘communing with others’ as it

seems key to her most recent work, Playing

with Pirates which she has just (literally

within the last five minutes) completed. It’s

an encounter with a rugby team. I reckon

this was a real communication challenge.

But more about that later.

There is a paradox to Anthea’s purpose-

Penny Siopis

less play – there is purpose to purposeless-

ness. It’s a paradox she embraces. And it’s

the same spirit that American theorist Pat

Kane promotes in his book The Play Ethic:

A Manifesto for a Different Way of Liv-

ing (2004). ‘Living as a player,’ he writes,

‘is precisely about embracing ambiguity,

revelling in paradox, yet being energised

by that knowledge.’ Kane goes on to assert

that there is in fact an ethic to this play.

‘An argument can be made,’ he writes, ‘that

ethics become even more important in an

endemically uncertain world. An ethic of

play is, in effect, an ethic which makes a

virtue, even a passion, out of uncertainty.’

These ideas about play are key to the per-

formance art to which Anthea subscribes.

Internationally this ‘genre’ is well developed.

Locally, Anthea sometimes seems the sole

candle-bearer. Her knowledge of her field is

passionate, driving her to pursue play in her

studies for her Masters degree. In her quest

she discovered many kindred spirits. Pat

Kane was one, as was the British psycho-

analyst Donald Winnicott. Winnicott devel-

oped theories about play, asserting that play

is essential for healthy human development.

His notion of a transitional space in which

play is enacted in childhood directly influ-

enced Anthea’s ideas about the social space

in which she performs and interacts. As she

says, ‘This transitional space is where adults

can play – at least momentarily. In this play

we give up the usual roles we adopt in life

and give over to being human.’

The Dutch cultural theorist Johan

Huizinga also featured in Anthea’s pan-

theon. Writing in 1955, Huizinga coined

the term homo ludens, which translates as

‘[man] the player’, a play on homo sapiens.

In his book Homo Ludens: A study of the

play element in culture, Huizinga makes

the point that play is as essential to hu-

man beings as life itself. Game theorists

Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, writing in

the early 2000s, also inspired Anthea with

their idea of play as ‘free movement within

a rigid structure’ a phrase becoming some-

thing of her mantra. The resistance to the

commodification of everyday life embodied

by the Situationists of the Fifties and Six-

ties, the ‘happenings’ of the Sixties and the

more contemporary practices of artists such

as Tino Sehgal and Gustavo Artigas have all

spurred Anthea to explore the limits of play

in performance.

Anthea’s sojourn in Switzerland in 2006

also had a profound influence on her

work. She spent eight months at the Ecole

Cantonale d’Art du Valais (ECAV) based in

Sierre, Switz erland as part of the inter-

institutional MAPS project (Masters of Arts

in the Public Sphere). ECAV espouses per-

formance art, and it was here that Anthea

created her first ‘sport’ piece in which play-

ers tried in vain to swim across snow. But

it has been Johannesburg that has exerted

the most striking influence of late. Johan-

nesburg is a risky place to live. Seeing this

risk as productive is vital to Anthea’s prac-

tice. ‘The more I risk, the more alive I feel,’

she says. ‘To take a risk means to have the

courage to try something new, to accept

that change is indeed the only constant

and to acknowledge that it is only through

change, error and risk that we grow.’

Performing this risk involves Anthea

sensing the limitations of her body. These

limitations, more often than not, deter-

mine how her work develops. This is espe-

cially so with the more impromptu pieces.

Bloody Finger from her Accident Series

(2006) is a perfect example. Here Anthea’s

play at having an accident – repeatedly

Anthea Moys – At my own risk 5The Brait-Everard Read Art Award 2009

sliding down a snow dune in slapstick

style  – ended when she sliced her finger

on jagged ice.

But this penchant for risk does not

mean that Anthea or her players deliber-

ately put themselves in harm’s way. Here

Anthea’s work differs from much perform-

ance (body) art of the day in which ‘mean-

ing’ is ascribed in terms of how much pain

the artist can endure. Rather, Anthea

seeks to perform acts that are ‘ordinarily’

human. For her, to be human is to feel the

heightened energy that the experience of

risk often provokes. In this she concurs

with Kane who highlights ‘[t]he need to

fully test out all the possibilities of being

human, yet under conditions which are

themselves not fatal, violent or beset with

privation and pain.’ As already noted this

does not mean that Anthea’s acts leave

her unscathed. She has just shown me the

grass burn on her arm – the mark of the

risk she took with her rugby team.

In her insistence that the action in the

moment is the most important aspect

of her performance and that this action

is, as mentioned, a form of communing,

Anthea shifts from performance that fo-

cuses on politics of difference to politics

of community. In South Africa the former

has dominated the field. In it the subjec-

tivity of the artist/performer has been

emphatically marked as racialised and/or

sexualised. This is understandable given

our history and the broader concerns of

feminism and post-colonialism. While not

denying the significance of these concerns,

Anthea wants to show other sides at play

in subjectivity.

This is an important part of her piece,

Boxing Games (2007). Here Anthea worked

with a team of boxers and their instructor,

George Khosi from K Khosi Boxing Gym in

Hillbrow. There were various performances

of this piece. The later version took place

on a rooftop in downtown Johannesburg.

Spectators watched from the 19th floor of

the adjacent Lister Building and from sur-

rounding apartments. The scene was dra-

matic. High energy exuded as spotlights

flooded the rooftop, illuminating the are-

na of action. The players came alive and

boxed furiously. At times it seemed that

their boxing turned to dancing. Only they

knew the rules. They stopped suddenly,

shouted to the sky and all fell down, like

a ring-o’-rosies game. The lights went off.

If there was any social comment to this

piece, it had to do with the risk of being

downtown, a place that is no safe haven

for anyone irrespective of race, gender or

physical self-possession.

A similar take on risk was key to Anthea’s

more recent work Nessun Dorma (2008).

In this performance Anthea relocated her

bedroom to the rose garden in downtown

Joubert Park for one night. Here she slept

under the watchful eyes of four CSS Tac-

tical Security guards, lulled by the serene

voices of two opera singers performing

Puccini’s Nessun Dorma. The gates of the

park were opened for the event. They are

usually closed as the rose garden is consid-

ered a dangerous place.

While this work played directly with risk

in its site-specificity, the image of fear was

undercut by Anthea’s apparent enjoyment

of the occasion. Snuggled in her bed she

read her book before falling asleep in the

way she does every night in the safety of her

home. In fact there is no safety. Anywhere.

Just as security guards watched over her in

Joubert Park, there are security systems all

over Johannesburg. The point here is that

Anthea’s openness to risk is enlivening.

American philosopher John Dewey’s words

in his Art as Experience (1934) are relevant

here. Commenting on how openness to ex-

perience has the potential for heightened

vitality, Dewey writes: ‘Instead of signify-

ing being shut up within one’s own private

feelings and sensations it signifies active

and alert commerce with the world.’

This brings us back to play as useless ac-

tion. Useless in the sense that it is free from

utilitarian domination. Anthea’s Gautrain:

Ophelia (2008) situated her small body in

the bowels of the earth, the same earth

currently being shaped into the monumen-

tal construction of the Gautrain project.

Her action of digging with her bare hands

into the soil, shifted by huge industrial

machinery, appeared ridiculous to all who

witnessed it. But for her, in her hardhat

and safety outfit, this was a site of poten-

tial à la Winnicott’s transitional space. As

Anthea says, ‘It was a space of uncertainty

– because I was so helpless in the face of

the larger action. Yet the action of burying

myself in the earth was a way of embracing

the uncertainly – even relishing it – rather

than feeling disempowered by it.’

The rugby piece has just happened. I

missed the game but will see the documen-

tation. The documentation of this piece – as

with all of Anthea’s work – has a kind of

autonomy in that it offers us a means to

imagine the moment of the performance.

We might well read other things into the

documentation – photographs and videos

– and indeed the performances themselves.

But that is up to us. For me, the leap Anthea

describes she took from the side-line of the

rugby field in her performance, lifted as she

was by hefty players who flung her like a

ball into the air above the scrum, evokes

conceptual artist Yves Kline’s famous, Leap

into the Void (1960). With Kline’s leap there

was manipulation of the photographic doc-

ument to make his leap out of a window

onto a street appear more risky than it was.

Not so with Anthea. But the players caught

her. For me this piece, like so much of her

work, speaks of how her desire to commune

with others through play is as much about

trust as it is about risk.

Penny Siopis is professor of Fine Arts at Wits University

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94.7 Cycle Challenge

Johannesburg, 2006

One-hour performance

PHOTOGRAPHER: JULIANA SMITH

In 2006, I rode the 94.7 Cycle Challenge, South Africa’s

biggest cycle race, on a stationary exercise bike.

The performance provoked reactions ranging from

encouraging cheers, to shouts of ‘fucking loser!’ This

interruption was an attempt to open up a space of

play in a highly structured event. For me, play is free

movement within the constraints of a structure, and it

feeds off that structure to create its own rules.

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Boxing Games

Two sites in Johannesburg, 2007

Two-week collaborative performance

PHOTOGRAPHER: CHRIS SAUNDERS

I worked on Boxing Games while participating in the

KinBeJozi residency in April 2007. For two weeks I

trained at the George K Khosi Boxing Gym in Hillbrow.

With the boxers and their trainers, I developed games

that explored the fraught relationship between violence

and play, safety and survival.

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Boxing Games (rooftop performance)

Two sites in Johannesburg, 2007

Four-minute collaborative performance

PHOTOGRAPHER: ALASTAIR MCLACHLAN

The Boxing Games project culminated in a performance on

a nearby rooftop, viewed from a gallery on the 19th floor of

a neighbouring building. The final performance incorporated

aspects of dance, theatre, and boxing. The performance was

viewed not only by the gallery’s attendees but also by the

many residents living in the surrounding buildings.

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Gautrain: Ophelia

Gautrain Construction Site, Braamfontein, 2008

Three-hour performance

Performance commissioned by Urban Concerns project and Johannesburg Art Gallery

PHOTOGRAPHER: ALASTAIR MCLACHLAN CAMERAMAN: BENJI MAGOWEN

Gautrain: Ophelia was a project that explored the

symbolic dimensions of the monolithic Gautrain project

at a more human level. These sites are transitional space

of tremendous potential, but also threat. The futile

act of digging with my hands, as giant graders and

bulldozers remake the landscape around me, was an

admission of the helplessness that many South Africans

feel in the face of change, but also an attempt to be

part of that change.

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Tunnel Shout

Gautrain Construction Site, Braamfontein, 2008

Three-hour performance

Performance commissioned by Urban Concerns project and Johannesburg Art Gallery

PHOTOGRAPHER: ALASTAIR MCLACHLAN CAMERAMAN: BENJI MAGOWEN

In Gautrain Series: Tunnel Shout I shout greetings down a large pipe which leads into the depths of the earth to where the construction workers are building the future. Even if it is only my own voice that echoes back to me, I enjoyed the attempt to make a connection with the unknown.

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Nessun Dorma (None Shall Sleep Tonight)

Joubert Park in front of Johannesburg Art Gallery, Jo-hannesburg, 2008.

Two-hour performance with opera singers Rheinald Moagi and Khotso Tsekeletsa and four CSS Tactical Security Guards

PHOTOGRAPHER: CHRIS SAUNDERS

The performance was repeated and the prints exhibited at the Dray Walk Gallery in London in November 2008.

In recent years, the parks and avenues surrounding the

Johannesburg Art Gallery in Joubert Parks have become

crowded taxi ranks and hawkers’ markets during the

day and no-go areas at night. In the Nessun Dorma

performance, I relocated my bed to the rose gardens

in Joubert Park. Guarded by four CSS Tactical Security

guards, and serenaded by two opera singers performing

Puccini’s aria Nessun Dorma, I fall asleep in a familiar

state of mind to South Africans – relaxed but forever

on guard.

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Sleeping Around (Newtown vs the North)

Newtown, May 2009

Sleeping Around (Alex vs Sandton)

Alexandria, May 2009

PHOTOGRAPHER: CHRIS SAUNDERS

These two images are part of a planned series of

performances entitled Sleeping Around that stem from

my Nessun Dorma performance at the Johannesburg Art

Gallery. In both of these performances, I am re-enacting

my bedtime routine in unfamiliar territory. The locations

are symbolic of the manufactured divisions that exist in

South Africa between safe and unsafe spaces: the safety

of the northern suburbs starkly juxtaposed against the

perceived danger of the inner city and the township.

Security guards stand watch over my body in an

enactment of safety, and a reminder that the very idea

of safety in South Africa is itself a performance.

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Playing with Pirates

Pirates Rugby Club, Parkhurst, June 2009

Two-hour collaborative performance with Junior Pirates Rugby Team

PHOTOGRAPHER: JOHN HODGEKISS

In Playing with Pirates I worked with the Pirates Junior

Rugby team. In this performance I played the role of the

ball. Throwing oneself into unfamiliar territory always

involves risk. It asks of both performer and participant

to engage in a shared space of play. For modern humans,

this is a risky proposition, for there are no winners or

losers in my rugby game. The outcome is the experience.

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I would like to extend my greatest thanks and wondrous appreciation to the following people for going out of their way in helping to bring my often quite unbelievable and hard-to-fathom ideas into reality. Thank you for playing with me.

George K Khosi and all the boxers I worked with at the K Khosi Boxing Gym in Claim Street, Hillbrow.

Jackon Mamashela at the Braamfontein Gautrain construction site.

Johan Bothma, Martin Scheepers, Non Welsford and the Junior Pirates Rugby team: U19 and U21.

The CSS Tactical team – specifically the guards who watched over me while I slept and Rheinald Moagi and Khotso Tsekeletsa for singing Puccinni’s aria Nessun Dorma so beautifully

I would like to thank the following photographers, videographers and printers for their ongoing support – for giving me their precious time and making the intangible tangible so that this ephemeral art can live on in solid form and in this way live on through others …

Chris SaundersAlastair MclachlanJohn HodgekissAdriano Giulio GiovanelliBenji MagowenAlexis FotiadisAmichai Tahor

I would also like to extend my thanks to the following people who have always supported me in my risky adventures and who have been there

literally for all the ups as well as the downs.

My family: Denise, Michael and Joshua Moys and Priscilla Scott as well as my extended family.

My love: Gwyd.

My fellow players and friends: Nicola van Der Linde, Lester Adams, Robyn de Klerk, Caitlin Judge, Gia Thom, Bronwyn Lace, Amy Watson, Rob Peers, Murray Kruger and the Wits players, Nadine Hutton, Murray and Lucy Turpin, Donovan Pugh, James Happe, Toni Morkel and Kai Lossgott.

I would also like to thank the following people for their continuous support in my studies and artistic endeavours over the years:

Dorothee Kreutzfeldt, Joseph Gaylard, Lesley Purkiss, Anthea Buys, Leora Farber, Sue Williamson, David Andrew, Kathryn Smith, Jeremy Wafer and all at The Trinity Session.

I would also like to extend special thanks to Penny Siopis, a great mentor and friend, for your guidance.

Thank you to the Everard Read Gallery and the Brait Foundation for taking a risk and giving me this amazing opportunity. And grand applause to all at the Wits School of the Arts – you have been my inspiration!

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the contribution made by all of the extraordinary people who have collaborated with me over the years – the boxers, grannies, rugby players, opera singers, security guards, trolley-men, stockbrokers, construction workers, bell-ringers, snow-swimmers

and cyclists. All have welcomed me into their homes, their workplaces and their playgrounds. My performances have been facilitated purely through the generosity of strangers like these who have found themselves approached out of the blue by a short girl with a tall story and, to my surprise and continuing delight, have agreed to play. These works belong as much to all of my collaborators as they do to me.

www.antheamoys.co.za

This exhibition catalogue is published in conjunction

with the exhibition

At my own risk

at the Everard Read Gallery, Johannesburg

30 July – 23 August 2009

Published in 2009 by

Everard Read Gallery (Pty) Ltd

6 Jellicoe Avenue,

Rosebank, Johannesburg

Copyright © Everard Read Gallery (Pty) Ltd

Copyright © Anthea Moys at risk in Johannesburg, Penny Siopis

Copyright © Photographs, individual photographers

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in

any form or by any means, without prior permission from

the publishers.

ISBN 978-0-620-44395-1

Designed by Kevin Shenton

Printed by Ultra Litho, Johannesburg