South Africa\u2019s mining industry holds 80% of the world\u2019s platinum, 41% of its gold and South African multinational corporation De Beers (founded by colonial industrialist Cecil Rhodes) produces more diamonds than any other corporation in the world.1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Stats as of 2007, see: www.southafrica.info\/business\/economy\/sectors\/mining.htm.<\/span> Subsequently, the bling purchased by the rapper goes back into large capitalist conglomerates held by a small elite in Africa and Western business concerns. Mining\u2019s impact on the economy and ecology of South Africa is a theme addressed by a number of artists. South African animator William Kentridge highlights the fact that gold transformed and defined the physical terrain of his native Johannesburg. Alongside of an interrogation of race and violence that occurred in the landscape outside of Johannesburg in Mine <\/em>(1991) and Felix in Exile<\/em> (1994), he highlights the fact that the hills that surround the city were formed by mining and were later reexcavated to extract more gold from them. Subsequently, mining creates the presence and disappearance of the physical landscape in Johannesburg. Kentridge renders the landscape with open pits, blasted for mining, and pylons rising up to demarcate property lines; it is a tarnished and sooty terrain scarred by the mining industry\u2019s interventions. In South Africa the narrative of social space is bound by this mining of precious materials for jewelry.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Okwui Enwezor, \u201cTruth and Responsibility: A Conversation with William Kentridge,\u201d Parkett<\/em>, 54 (1998): 165-66.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n A second intervention is British artist Simon Starling\u2019s One Ton<\/em> (2005), a series of five photographs printed on platinum, each depicting the open pit where the ore was extracted. Starling\u2019s title refers to the one ton of ore used to produce the platinum that the photographs were printed on, highlighting the tremendous energy consumption and stress upon the country that mining platinum produces. Furthermore, One Ton<\/em> provides a link between the artwork as a luxury good and the materiality of its production; this relationship extends to the connection between the raw materials that produce the bling that we see so effortlessly in the music video as a marker of the rapper\u2019s affluence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Starling and Kentridge represent a different side to the production of bling-bling (in the form of gold, platinum and diamonds that are all a part of the economy in South Africa) as a luxury good. They highlight its commodity status, producing the artwork as a commercial good while also revealing the industrial narratives of bling\u2019s production and its relationship to the economic and environmental concerns. Durban\u2019s image as a luxury resort presented in the music video is a world away from the very real and difficult political and economic disparities of South Africa\u2019s townships. While rappers display their \u201cice\u201d to prove they have made it, South Africa\u2019s most poor struggle to gain access to water in the newly deregulated economic terrain of post-apartheid South Africa.3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - For a detailed account of the politics of privatization in South Africa, see Ashwin Desai and Richard Pitthouse\u2019s engaging essay \u201cDispossession, Resistance and Repression in Mandela Park,\u201d in Grant Farred and Rita Barnard, eds., \u201cAfter the Thrill is Gone: A Decade of Post-Apartheid South Africa,\u201d a special edition of South Atlantic Quarterly<\/em>, 103:4 (Fall 2004): 841-75.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite the problematic image of the production of bling-bling in South Africa, its representation endures in the work of contemporary arts collective Avant Car Guard. Formed in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2005, Avant Car Guard\u2019s tactics for producing art seem concerned with what they see as a growing commodification of the South African artist in a global art market, while at the same time engaging in the direct and often adolescent tactics of Young British Artists (YBAs) such as Tracy Emin or the Chapman Brothers. In a recent exhibition of paintings Avant Car Guard engage with bling-bling as a way of advancing their criticism. The Bitch Who Saw Tomorrow <\/em>(2009) is a painting of a black and white dog with a skeleton in her mane, each shooting vectors of light from their eyes. The dog is wearing a tie and has two hands with pointer and ring fingers raised; one finger\u2019s tip suggests a phallus. The fluorescent imagery seems immediately vacant, having more to do with the ironic hipster pastiche of Brooklyn or London rather than engaging in any serious discussion of the role of the South African artist. Its fluorescent nature demands that one notice the artist and his output; performing the same function that bling-bling does for the rapper. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The fascination with tacky kitsch continues in Avant Car Guard\u2019s \u201cblinged\u201d out portrait of South African artist Robin Rhode. Rhode, \u00adcurrently residing in Berlin, is a South African artist who frequently explores spatial dynamics through schoolyard play. Rhode has recently come to international prominence through BMW\u2019s \u201cExpression of Joy Campaign,\u201d where he used a BMW sports car to paint on a 200 x 300-foot canvas. Avant Car Guard renders their image of Rhode in Robin Rhode, Not Alone <\/em>(2009), dressing their subject with a multitude of bling-bling. Rhode is in a white tank top with black top hat and white headdress beneath it, his hands are cocked mimicking gang signs; he also wears several rings, watches and four gold chains around his neck. One of the pendants on the chain is the BMW logo referring to Rhode\u2019s commercials and a second is a \u201clucky rabbit\u201d of sorts. This rabbit\u2019s head bears resemblance to William Kentridge and is clutching a bottle of wine. The drunken, slumped over hybrid makes reference to a wine label Kentridge designed for a Cape Town vineyard to help fund extra performances of his staging of Mozart\u2019s The Magic Flute<\/em>, for underprivileged children in South Africa.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - www.artthrob.co.za\/09may\/reviews\/witw.html<\/span> However Avant Car Guard understand Kentridge\u2019s actions as part of an ever-expanding constellation of commercialism in South African art, pairing it with Rhode\u2019s BMW ads. The pairing suggests not only Avant Car Guard\u2019s critiques of their perceived commercialism, but points to the rising status both artists have received internationally. <\/p>\n\n\n\n While directly critiquing the role of the artist in South Africa, Avant Car Guard\u2019s work engages the question of what role the image of bling-bling plays within a globalized paradigm. Making claims against a brand of \u00adtransnational aesthetics that purportedly leave South Africa out of the narrative of production, Avant Car Guard\u2019s work itself becomes a form of bling-bling and subsequently approaches a transnational aesthetic. Its flashy nature demonstrates its presence like the rapper\u2019s jewelry. Unlike Kentridge\u2019s rough hewn charcoal drawings whose very \u00admateriality (\u00adreferring to coal) highlights the relationship between production and the history of mining and apartheid violence, Avant Car Guard\u2019s images \u00adrepresent an \u00adahistorical mode of thinking. Their fluorescent structure incites for political reasons, but also for Avant Car Guard\u2019s own particular place within the South African art market (and presumably an international one as well). In doing so Robin Rhode, Not Alone<\/em> becomes a marker of the \u00adcollective\u2019s own bling-blingness. The painting, like a chain or diamond \u00adpendant that announces the power and money of the rapper, \u00adcommunicates a desire to be made a part of a particular grouping (a member of the South African arts community, or a multi-platinum artist bringing us back again to the relations between capital, success and precious metals). <\/p>\n\n\n\n The direct and demanding role of Avant Car Guard\u2019s desire for presence is often expressed through the rapper\u2019s shock tactics. Untitled <\/em>(2009) bears simply the phrase \u201cFuck This\/Fuck That\u201d with the Avant Car Guard logo painted in the corner. Untitled <\/em>is explicitly apolitical; it makes no claim for South Africa and its art outside of a direct refusal. Exhibited alongside of this image was The Most Beautiful Girl in the World <\/em>(2009), a portrait of Goodman Gallery owner (one of Johannesburg\u2019s oldest and most prestigious galleries representing amongst others, William Kentridge) Liza Essers, reclining naked with the title: \u201cSometimes, when we fuck our girlfriend, we pretend we\u2019re really fucking Liza,\u201d written alongside of her portrait. This image brings us back full circle to the concerns of bling-bling that this essay addressed at the onset. Avant Car Guard reveals a confluence of capital and sexuality in much the same way that Ludacris contends in his video that his money allows him to display power through the acquisition of bling-bling and to lure women. By desiring Essers\u2019 body in this fashion, Avant Car Guard\u2019s claim seems to suggest that they wish to \u201cfuck\u201d her in two ways: sexually but also as a gallery owner perhaps through fiscal relations in the art market. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Returning to the original question, it must be asked: what does bling-bling do politically? It seems that in Avant Car Guard\u2019s case it highlights a particular paradox located in the divides between Starling and Kentridge\u2019s material concerns and the displays of power located in the hip-hop video. While the use of bling-bling in Avant Car Guard\u2019s work \u00adfunctions as a \u00addenigratory tactic against both Kentridge and Rhode, its claim through flash is that \u201cwe\u2019re here too.\u201d As Avant Car Guard seek to mark their \u00adpresence within South Africa\u2019s galleries and to further establish their own place within an international and very post-modern aesthetic, they dovetail further with Ludacris\u2019 video. Ludacris attempts to establish some myth of origin by returning to Africa and its rhythmic structure that underpins hip-hop (which is represented through Zulu dance \u00adceremonies in the video). Subsequently bling-bling\u2019s desire to undermine, flaunt, or critique the traditional standings of power structures within Africa does nothing but codify these orders. Ludacris seamlessly presents an image of Africa that is spectacle; the political divides of Soweto or the Cape Flats townships are missing from his representation of Africa, as an ahistorical image of tribal culture and urban resorts that look like Las Vegas meet in effortless bliss. Likewise, the multicoloured and garish images of Avant Car Guard scream for a desire of presentness. In both Ludacris and Avant Car Guard\u2019s work, bling-bling becomes an ideological screen that prevents a real analysis of what is at stake in these images, be it the rapper or \u00ademerging global artist such as Rhode. Bling-bling obfuscates a position of both accumulation and production at the core of the journeys to Europe made (or demanded) by Avant Car Guard and the shifts towards authenticity made by Ludicris.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/69_DO04_Hennlich_SStarling_One-Ton-1-scaled.jpg\")
photos : permission de l’artiste | courtesy of the artist, neugerriemschneider, Berlin & The Modern Institute\/
Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/69_DO04_Hennlich_SStarling_One-Ton-2-scaled.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/69_DO04_Hennlich_AvantCarGuard_ROBIN-RHODE-NOT-ALONE-scaled.jpg\")
photo : permission des artistes | courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/69_DO04_Hennlich_AvantCarGuard_THE-BITCH-WHO-SAW-TOMORROW-scaled.jpg\")
photo : permission des artistes | courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n