Associação Cultural Videobrasil

The issue of space is intensely present in the production of Gregg Smith (Cape Town, 1970). Often derived from performances in which he is the actor or one of the actors, his video work shows the potential of the medium for laying bare the heterotopias typical of contemporary relationships of space. The fruit of a career path that points to a fierce hybridism between different artistic practices, such as painting, video, and performance, his works are always somehow related to the situations and contexts in which they are produced. Without creating totalizing impositions, they manage to lay bare the rhythms of politics and social life, reverberating the many schemes through which we are submitted. “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible,” as Paul Klee put it. The work of Smith awakens this other gaze in us.

Some of Smith's key achievements are rooted, according to the artist himself, in the period he spent in reclusion in a small studio in downtown Cape Town, in the late 1990s. After obtaining a degree from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town (1988-1991), he was experiencing a “gradual disillusionment with object making and object selling,” after a few years working with paintings, murals, and performances. Doing research work at the City Library, he discovered the theses of Austrian psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, who suggested the treatment of autistic and psychically troubled patients with activities aimed at redirecting individuals to the present tense, promoting positive desires. “The idea seemed of particular use to me in the traumatized condition of the South African psyche at this time,” Smith wrote.

This insight inspired a series of urban intervention actions, such as A Book of Giving (1999), in which the artist went out in the streets of Cape Town with twenty-five roses, gave the first rose to a passerby, the second rose to a person indicated by the one who received the first rose, and so forth. By the end of the day, after delivering the last rose, he had gone across town eleven times. The intervention The Lovephones, presented in Cape Town (2000) and London (2001), is structured around personal narratives. Here, Smith seeks and records real-life love stories, told by the protagonists, and uses pay phones to play back the recordings to randomly chosen listeners. In London, the project was supported by the Gasworks Institute and by artist Tara Sampy.

Between 2001 and 2002, while undergoing an artistic residency program at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam, Smith created a series of performances. In Notorious, presented in Germany and at the international performance event MIP (Manifestação Internacional de Performance), held in the city of Belo Horizonte (2003), Smith features alongside other actors in public remakes of fragments of the Hitchcock film of the same name, which repeat themselves dozens of times, as in a looping. In Trams Taken and Trams Missed (2001), he chooses public spaces as settings for skipping rope while telling stories of encounters that supposedly took place in the Amsterdam public transportation system. In We Met at the Busstop (2001), he approaches people at bus stops and dances while telling a story that he claims to have lived with a traveler after a casual meeting.

In 2001, Smith made video of these last two performances: in the video for Trams..., Smith tells four stories while swimming, playing squash, or smoking cigars. In We Met..., he tells the story of the meeting to the camera, as if he were making a statement to the police. These works seem to set the direction for the artist's future video work: his transition from performance to video was born of his desire to record performances, which then evolved through the incorporation of narrative structures. The same concept guides The Interview (2002), in which he creates an unusual dialogue between a man and a woman, playing the roles of both and alternating the viewers' perspective between the two. This direct dialogue with the camera incorporates the procedures of modern cinema, opening up to include viewers in the narrative.

Also derived from experiences in performance is Background to a Seduction (2004), based on a series of presentations that the artist made to his neighbors in Roubaix, a small town in northern France where he lived in 2003 and 2004. In the video, selected for the 15th Videobrasil International Electronic Art Festival, a couple is seen talking in a single setting, from different perspectives and in different situations. As the conversation unfolds, the viewer is sent to different places, and caught in a situation in which space and time are inserted into the fluidity of a typically heterogeneous, open, and flowing space. This traveling without moving is set against a sort of wallpaper-out of which, from time to time, a small flower comes off and “flies” across the screen.

This way of operating space through the creation of transitional and nonlinear situations is experimented with once more in Should We Never Meet Again (2005), first presented as a video installation and later on as a single channel presentation. In the video, Smith walks the streets while talking to himself; from time to time, a passerby walks by him carrying a large screen, and transports the whole action to other spaces. Again, the artist uses video as a starting point for a complex approach to space, by means of a nonlinear narrative. Viewers are taken from open, public spaces to intimate, private ones.

The distance between impulse and gesture is the common theme to the artist's performances-the latest ones include Love, Jealousy and Wanting to Be in Two Places at the Same Time, and It's not What You Do, It's the Way You Do It. In the sidelines, Smith works for the promotion of meetings, residencies, and collective exchange projects involving artists from South Africa and other countries. In 2003, he carried out the first edition of Very Real Time, a project for one-month-long actions and residencies in Johannesburg and Cape Town, thus encouraging particularly the production of performances and socially committed work. Linked to the RAIN Artists Initiatives Network, these residencies have featured artists such as Cintia Marcelle, from Brazil, who held a residency in the first edition, during which she created a striking series of photographs, along with Jean Meeran, in which the two mix in with the landscape.

“The project attempts to take into account the complex historic, social, and geographic forces which influence the intimate life of the individual, and to find ways of challenging and overcoming psychological barriers which exist. Through exchange, the project intends to create parallels and comparisons with situations elsewhere in the world,” Gregg Smith said about Very Real Time, which is currently in its second edition.