Toying with the artist's 'signature'

Installation view image by Mary Corrigall

It is not often you get to view a gallery exhibition that you could term 'unconventional'. So much of the art presented in commercial spaces or even museum galleries conforms to a set of often unspoken rules about contemporary practice, from how it is packaged to the subject matter deemed interesting to the prevailing prized modes of expression.

Kamyar Bineshtarigh's exhibition, fittingly titled Group Show, at Southern Guild's Cape Town gallery shatters all kinds of expectations we have about art. This is satisfying but also raises some uneasy questions that plague artists at different points in their practice. Such as how far can novelty carry a practice? And how far can you push it without undermining the characteristics that made it compelling in the first place?

I have consulted with several artists who, having gained recognition for an innovative medium or process, often find themselves confined to a particular subject matter and a limited set of themes. Recognisable artistic aesthetics or signatures are what artists strive to discover and establish, but over time these can become their self-made prisons that confine their practice or, through mechanical repetition, dissipate their meaning. In this way artists are locked in a dance between retaining their 'signature' and advancing it in ways that are interesting for them and viewers.

Bineshtarigh is an established artist – having enjoyed a small solo exhibition at the Norval Foundation earlier in his career and being represented by Southern Guild – but he is not a mid-career artist yet. It has been interesting to observe the tension in a practice rooted in a novel mode of expression that relies on 'ready-made' marks. Bineshtarigh has pioneered a 'process' and vocabulary that relies on retrieving accidental marks left on walls through a transfer process that sees him peel off surfaces. It started with the wall in his art studio before he applied the technique at a car spray-paint business. He retrieves sections of walls from these settings. Though he has a taste for arbitrary marks, there is a prevailing aesthetic to his work – call it monochromatic abstraction.

His work naturally centres on the significance of accidental marks, tracing history, retrieving or memorialising the past and weighing the present through ephemeral marks, etc. It should be noted that he has also produced other works, such as the ink on canvas works in the Infitada series. These are visually and conceptually compelling, but the value of novelty does hold sway in the art world. As such, his latest solo exhibition sees him digging in deeper into the wall-peeling mode.

His process is deeply rooted in authenticity – capturing a literal slice of reality. There would be little point in going through the process of retrieving marks he had made or had purposefully made, though naturally in this exhibition, which sees him peeling parts of other artists' studio walls, it comes sharply into focus that in choosing who the walls belong to, where they are and what function they serve, he has a calculated hand in the end product. So, there is a degree of showmanship at work, which we should expect – he is an artist, not a historian.

His hand in the work is somewhat overshadowed by the names, marks and other sorts of ephemera left by other artists on their studio walls, who are all mostly well known, ranging from the older vanguard Jane Alexander and Mikhael Subotsky to Mary Sibande and Nandipha Mntambo to some of the new fashionable artists such as Brett Charles Seiler.

Given that these artists are lauded, it is hard to view the squiggles, references and marks on their walls as arbitrary, nor is the compulsion to preserve this ephemera, however ordinary, unexpected. Their names, reputations and the desire to spot any marks that substantiate or point to their work or signatures/aesthetics support the value of these wall fragments and render them as anything but ordinary. Perhaps this is the question he aims to pose: why are artists' marks more important, and what is the difference between a line on the wall and one on the canvas?

The wall fragments at this exhibition bring to mind the work of the British artist Rachel Whiteread, who cast sculptures from the negative spaces between and under structures and objects. Bineshtarigh's transfers indeed caption the spaces surrounding the 'main' events, actual artworks, shall we say.

It was one thing when he presented transfers from his own studio, the residue of his own work, but in this instance, the notion of authorship is challenged (as the marks and residue belong to other artists), and their reputations shore up the value of his own work. No doubt this is not intentional, and Bineshtarigh has stated that the works are all priced according to the market value of his work.

This exhibition is conceptually exciting – most local artists are only too keen to align with an art market system where the authorship of art is attributed to one individual. However, this exhibition is packaged as a solo by Bineshtarigh. This implies that while the art market and the value of art can be challenged in a commercial setting, it can't ever be fully realised.

From another perspective, it's possible to view Bineshtarigh's latest series as over-compliance with the system. In linking his art to other coveted artists, he adds another layer of value, interest and once again novelty to his art. Who wouldn't want to own a piece of a well-known artist's studio wall that is framed as art? His fragments are almost historical documents, ready-made for a museum survey show sometime in the future. But then what does it mean to own a Bineshtarigh work? In this Group Show perhaps it is not surprising that Bineshtarigh emerges as a 'curator' rather than an artist in a traditional sense.

Seiler's To-Do list

It brings into focus the notion, too, that the spaces artists inhabit are intrinsically of interest. In line with this, this exhibition doesn't feel like a celebration of the ordinary or of time itself – contained in what would normally be a fleeting and arbitrary set of marks on a wall – but the canonising of artists.

A wall fragment of a Seiler to-do list drives this home and, rightly or wrongly, feels like an extension of Seiler's social media communications, which tend to centre on him displaying his tattooed body, looking cool in his studio – in other words, 'playing the artist' and revelling in the aesthetics of making art and leading the life of an artist. In this context, his aesthetic lives beyond his canvases. A point this exhibition makes about artmaking.

This exhibition is fascinating in that it presents some interesting questions about the value of art and the systems that set these conditions. Bineshtarigh has successfully continued to extend the sense of novelty driving his art, though aspects of it do feel compromised. It can be tricky to sustain an aesthetic of non-aesthetics and to challenge the norms of a sphere you ultimately strive for long-term membership.