Two Ways of Keeping
On Gavin Krastin, live art, and the gathering to come
by Nkhensani Mkhari
Trophy, performed at the Cape Town Fringe Festival 2015 (Cape Town, South Africa), image courtesy of the artist from Gavin Krastin's website.
I. Two ways of keeping
Every culture of art is, beneath its institutions, a theory of persistence. It decides how acts of making will be carried forward in time. There are two fundamental ways of keeping. The first keeps the object: the painting, the sculpture, the print, which can be stored, moved, cared for and returned to across generations. The second keeps the event: the dance, the ritual, the performance, which exists at full intensity for an interval and then passes into the bodies and memories of those who were present, to be retold, relearned and enacted again. Neither mode is superior. They are different relations to time, and a mature culture of art is one that knows how to hold both.
The difficulty is that our inherited institutions were designed for only one of them. They became expert at keeping objects and remained uncertain about keeping events. I will call the structure that produced this imbalance the wall. The wall is not simply a surface on which pictures hang. It is an operation of sorting that separates the ocular object from the body that labours, the gallery from the stage, the fine arts from the performed ones, and assigns each to its own building, its own critics, its own economy.
What, then, becomes of an artist who works on the far side of the wall, and what might be built there?
Discharge, 2012, image courtesy of the artist from Gavin Krastin's website.
II. The trained eye
In South Africa, performance has long occupied a peripheral position in the visual arts. It is often treated as a supplement to the main event, a modality outside the wall-based field that most of our institutions were built to receive. This is not the fault of any single platform. It is a habit of perception installed over centuries, and it operates in each of us before judgement begins.
I include myself. I have felt my own attention move from a labouring body back toward an object on a wall, because that is what my eye was trained to seek. The first place the wall stands is in the viewer. That is also, encouragingly, the first place it can be taken down.
III. The persistence of the vanishing
Gavin Krastin has worked on the far side of the wall for the better part of two decades, and his career presents a productive paradox. Performance is the form that does not persist as an object. Krastin's practice is one of the most persistent in South African art. How does a body of work composed of events become a sustained and cumulative practice?
The terms are established by his biography. Born in Cape Town in 1987, trained in drama and art history at Rhodes, he works across theatre, dance, scenography and what he calls live art. He does not use performance to escape the politics of the body. He uses the body to occupy them, making a room conscious of its own arrangements: who watches, who is exposed, who is invited to participate. His stated subject, sustained across his career, is the permeability of boundaries and what it means to cross them. Subject and medium coincide. An artist concerned with the crossing of boundaries works in the form that crosses the wall.
Labouring Gratitude, 2022, image courtesy of the artist from Gavin Krastin's website.
His works form a sequence rather than a collection. There is a performance made with his mother, on familial care and the slow turn of generations. There is a work that stages the labour of fundraising itself as live art, bringing the hidden work of making art possible into public view as the event. And there is a sustained excavation of his own whiteness, in which a queer body of European descent reaches back past Empire toward Gaelic and Welsh folk ritual, until pre-imperial white culture becomes strange to itself and the descendant of the coloniser appears in his own theatre as the ritual subject rather than the observer.
That last gesture carries particular weight in this country. The wall historically placed some peoples in the category of ritual and others in the category of the rational witness. Krastin moves his own inheritance across that line. He declines the comfort of innocence and goes in search of what his lineage buried, and what he recovers is not a pure origin but a more honest relation to the ground he stands on.
IV. From event to ecology
The mechanism that allows a vanishing form to become an enduring practice is construction. In 2018 Krastin founded the Live Art Arcade, a nomadic, site-responsive platform that funds, curates and pays emerging artists to make durational work. Where there was little infrastructure for his form, he built some.
The distinction is structural. A single performance passes. A platform that repeatedly produces performances endures, because what persists is not the event but the conditions under which events recur. Persistence moves from the object to the system. Krastin took the position of the periphery and turned it into ground on which others could stand. Measured this way, his two decades are not a story of endurance against the odds. They are a story of cultivation.
What the wall does not keep, a community of practice can.
Yet to be determined, performed at the National Arts Festival, 2018 (Grahamstown, South Africa) and the ICA Live Art Festival 2018 (Cape Town, South Africa).
V. The constellation
Under what conditions does a practice become legible as a field? When it appears among others. In Relational Trans_Positions, the FADA Creative Research Platform exhibition at the University of Johannesburg curated by Farieda Nazier, Krastin appears as one position in a larger arrangement. The word for that arrangement already belongs to his own platform, which has long described its programmes as constellations of portals into other worlds. A constellation is a pattern that exists only in the relations between its points.
Beside him stands Oupa Sibeko, who has performed in the Arcade, and whose practice examines the black male body, black pain, spectacle and the ethics of re-enacting pain, drawing on African indigenous knowledge and communal performance. Two bodies, one white and queer, one black, approach a shared national history from different positions within it, and both insist that the body remain present rather than represented.
Oupa Sibeko performance, VIAD Research Centre (Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre), courtesy of Nkhensani Mkhari
The rest of the constellation extends the principle beyond performance. Xylan de Jager cultivates the audience's own microbes on agar, so that the gallery becomes a living map authored by everyone who entered. Tobias Barnard, a microbiologist, treats microorganisms as collaborators and allows them to produce images no hand could compose. Leora Farber grows bacteria across cast Delft porcelain, making the long life of Dutch imperialism, slavery and dispossession visible as something alive and still in motion. Christa van Zyl transforms the invisible cognitive labour of institutional life, meeting notes and unconscious drawings, into textile and drawing. Neil Lowe carries a single form through aluminium, copper, paper and screen, allowing each translation to transform the last.
Each of these works is a process rather than a finished thing, and each generates its form through relations: between visitor and microbe, porcelain and bacterium, meeting and hand, drawing and material. The exhibition's title names the principle. A trans-position is a carrying across. The most generative work now happens in the interval between disciplines.
The question he leaves in the room is no longer a complaint about the wall. It is an invitation to everyone on either side of it. What might we build together, so that the body can stay?
VI. An older structure returning
What is the minimum structure required for art to exist without the wall? The answer begins with the recognition that the wall is historical, not natural.
The taxonomy that divided making into fine art and craft, performance and ritual, and that placed the ownable ocular object above the communal, the durational and the danced, is an Enlightenment arrangement that arrived here by ship. Beneath it, and persisting through it, the aesthetic life of this continent did not separate the mask from the dance that animated it, the praise poem from the body that carried it, or the object from the gathering that gave it meaning. In that structure, the work is a relation among body, object, time and community. The object is one term in the relation, never its sum.
This changes how we should read the present. What contemporary curators call post-disciplinarity is at once a new direction and a return. The dissolving of the boundaries between theatre, performance art, acting and the gallery is not a rupture with our history. It is the recovery of a structure in which making was never divided.
The future of the form is also its oldest shape.
VII. The gathering
If the work is a relation among body, object, time and community, a further proposition follows. Any place where a community gathers around art is a potential site for that relation to be completed. The university offers the live form time, research and rigour. The festival offers it an audience in motion. The art fair offers something rarer still: the moment when a city's artists, collectors, writers, students and curious strangers are gathered in one place at once. That density of attention is exactly the condition the older structure required. The gathering was always part of the work.
What, then, is needed to host the live form well? Less than one might think, and it can be stated precisely. Time, so that duration is not squeezed into an interval between other events. Payment, so that the artist's labour is valued as labour, which is the lesson the Arcade has been teaching since 2018. Attention, so that the body is met as the work rather than as its accompaniment. And a willingness to let something be complete without being collected, to value the experience itself as the thing received.
None of these conditions is exotic. Each is already present somewhere in the South African field: in Krastin's platform, in university galleries like FADA, in festival stages, in fairs that bring a public together. The task is not to invent the structure but to connect its parts.
Exhibition at FADA Gallery, image courtesy of the University of Johannesburg.
VIII. The turnstile
The exhibition map at FADA marks a turnstile on the ground floor. It admits one body at a time into a building full of microbes, rituals, porcelain, memory and work. I have come to read it not as a gate that counts people but as a threshold that gathers them. Each click is someone arriving.
Somewhere inside, Krastin is doing something slow and demanding that will not outlast the afternoon. No one will carry it home, and yet everyone present will leave carrying it. The event passes into the people who witnessed it, which is how events have always been kept.
