Junkmail – some preliminary thoughts
These four etchings
by Zak Benjamin have intrigued me no
end. Just when I think I can "read" them they present yet another
face. There is always a haunting familiarity about these images that
implores me to keep looking for answers.
Titling the series Junkmail creates an immediate tension
between the transient nature of junk mail and the
treasured status of a work of art. The word junk
implies something that has no intrinsic value - you no sooner have it, than you
toss it out. Junk mail epitomises the nature of our consumer-driven
culture: what is in fashion today is discarded for tomorrow’s newfangled ideas.
Even if one tries to resist consumerist culture, the built-in obsolescence
of electrical appliances and other everyday commodities ensures that one remains
in this vicious cycle of buying and throwing away. These four etchings
bring into question the whole notion of supply and demand, and what the culture
of consumerism is doing to natural resources.
In the realm of fine art,
an etching almost invariably comments upon the human condition and society at
large. An etching has an intrinsic value that can transcend our
times, for posterity to reflect upon. Art that has meaning will nurture future
generations. Giving the title Junkmail
to this series of beautifully crafted images creates a tension of opposites. The
rationale behind an etching (supported by centuries of tradition) and the
objectives of junk mail (a recent phenomenon of consumerism and mass
production) are worlds apart. Or are they?
All four images in this
series of etchings have the following in common: a landscape with vegetation, a
fully clothed woman, a domestic appliance and what looks like a price tag. The
domestic appliances are patently out of place -
nowhere in the landscape is there any hint of any form of human habitation. There
is not even a hint in the landscape of junk mail’s quintessential target –
suburbia’s post-box. The landscapes could be described as either forlorn or
pristine. There is no evidence that the land has been cultivated or
mined. The objects and the female forms are superimposed on the landscapes,
giving them an eerie quality that forces the viewer to contemplate their
meaning in relationship to one another and to the whole series.
In each etching an
immediate tension is created between the modern-day domestic appliance and the anachronistic
female figure in period costume. Despite the obvious time-warp
between the appliances and the women, they are communicating. They are in
confrontation with one another. The appliances take on totemic, monolithic
presences in each picture. Are they objects of desire? Or do they represent the
cumbersome problem of fusing the disparate cultures of our shrinking global
village? How are those women and those appliances to be reconciled? Do
the etchings comment upon the dilemma that women face: of being, themselves,
commodities in this still male-dominated twenty-first century?
Advertising is supposed to be sexy. There is another
antithesis here that calls for thought. There is a naked brashness to the
appliances when juxtaposed with the strangely dressed women - quite foreign to the
kind of advertising we’re used to.
Junkmail series: VCR
A formidable
looking, somewhat disorientated woman
hovers accusingly as if seeing things for what they are
for the first time. She could have emanated from the period of the Great
Inquisition. She confronts a tree. Could
this tree be the axis mundi, the
Tree of Life? Is she the archetypal Earth Mother? The
drama is heightened by a VCR superimposed on a foreground that looks like a
stage. A price tag hangs in the sky. It ends in the ubiquitous magical
threshold-number 99, heralding the must-have bargain. It seems to want to slip away
into the ether and disappear, while the pumpkins on the ground are
conspicuously proliferating themselves.
March 2007