One plus one equals something else: Michael MacGarry at Everard Read

In The System Absorbs All Opposition, Michael MacGarry’s latest solo exhibition at Everard Read, an impressive amount of work is slotted into a pre-planned and meticulously produced exhibition model.

A lot is going on in MacGarry’s show. Collectively, it reads like a dystopian museum collection: “Artefacts from the end of the world’” perhaps. Or “Relics of late-stage capitalism”. Nunchucks made of bits of scaffolding, and KFC-chip necklaces occupy the walls among fictional self-portraits, while sculptures masquerading as weapons are installed throughout the space. Everything chimes, resonates, and even clashes, producing alternative meanings and sparking new associations.

Running through it all are three clear threads, namely identity, materiality and entropy. But this is not simply hollow reflexivity, self-evident materiality, or entropy as meaningless chaos. Activating all of the works in The System Absorbs All Opposition is a practised performativity — an “internal logic system” that speaks to the exhibition as a whole.

In MacGarry’s Tribe series, he photographs himself in various guises and get-ups. They’re fictional, of course, and “theatrical in the way that identity can be performative,” he explains. The sculptural works, specifically the growing arsenal of non-functioning guns, also carry an element of performance. Here, MacGarry’s penchant for materiality is on show. Steel is steel, and wood is wood, but they tend to short-circuit one another, as well as the overall function of the object, in their meeting.

Similarly, there’s a floundering functionality at play. The sculptures are an amalgamation of objects that make sense in their distinct parts — a handgun, a metal sphere, a steel plinth — but when soldered and sculpted together, they are conceptual follies. Some exist as three-dimensional diagrams, like an exploded blueprint of the object, each distinct part contributing to the greater image or narrative of the weapon, which never quite sees itself through.

As MacGarry puts it: “One plus one equals something else.” A gas canister plus a decommissioned gun barrel equals a riff on historical materialism, or a punchy critique of the contemporary art market. 

But it’s not all theory and institutional critique. MacGarry’s works carry an overt humour. They’re strange to look at, fun to puzzle out. Each sculpture carries the suggestion of an action, an activity, or a sound. BANG! You see a gun firing into a solid steel orb, the bullet halted as soon as it exits the chamber. CRASH! You hear the twang of a stringless guitar being smashed by its axe handle. In the curated stillness of the Everard Read gallery, a space that asks its visitors to refrain from taking selfies, these nonsensical moments are made even more entertaining.

Other works exist like participatory jokes. Reflecting on them and their individual parts is something like a set-up — what do you get when you place the frolicking figures of Matisse’s Dance beneath burning gallows bearing the sign “mercantile capitalism”? Vassal class reads the artwork’s title and punchline.

This artwork is drawn from a series of paper works “collectively part of the Tontine series, which is named for what was essentially a Dutch pyramid scheme in the 17th century.” MacGarry considers these paper works a kind of “conceptual glue” in the exhibition. All of them are painstakingly planned out, before being corrupted by a deliberate act of playfulness towards entropy.

In Pale Fire, named after the metafictional Nabokov novel, vector line drawings plotted out with architectural precision are changed, subtly yet profoundly, by the simple act of taking a line for a walk. In this narrow window between the conceptualisation and creation of the work, is “a kind of lunacy that corrupts and extends itself to the rest of the display,” he explains. 

Returning to the collective scene, the idea of a speculative world — or perhaps even a fictive engagement with the past — emerges. Mighty Man (Issue 17), lifted from the pages of the apartheid propaganda comic by the same name, and 1972, bearing the text “Ecology Now!” both speak to the generative possibilities of fiction, good and bad. What’s MacGarry’s take on fiction?

“My relationship to artmaking is somewhat fictional. The plasticity of it is the appeal — the fact that you can generate whatever you want, you can treat yourself as a sculptural object, your identity is flexible, the entire thing is fictional,” he says. “There’s the idea that the artist is always acting in good faith, that they’re acting as an artist, and I’m not interested in that, I’m not necessarily acting in good faith. This is not a market-orientated exercise for me, it’s something else entirely.”

Fiction, then, and its ability to productively distort, might be the outcome of MacGarry’s experiments with identity, materiality and entropy in this show — not to act in bad faith, but rather to short-circuit the premise of working in good faith. What emerges is a metafiction — an exhibition that draws attention to its self-conscious structure, undermining and collapsing the very space in which it exists, and asking its viewers to draw their conclusions from the remnants. 

The System Absorbs All Opposition exhibition is on at Everard Read, Johannesburg until June 15.