Reviews:

On September 17, 1997, the Osaka Triennale decided to award Basil C. Frank's photograph: "Jaws and White Dog" (1996) the Grand Prize. This marks an achievement - an international recognition asserting that Frank, produced,within our current visual culture, an image that carries meaning, shows how and what it means, and shows it well. It is, therefore, only proper and reasonable to take this work as a starting point in this introductory essay to the artist's work; assuming - as one can and should - it contains much of the artist's concerns, sensibilities, and ways of working and thinking relevant to his other works as well - large and small sculptures,assemblages and/or painting "combines" - to use a term taken, of course, from Robert Rauschenberg's works under that name, designating a similar mode of operation. Indeed Frank likes to cross lines (from painting to sculpture to photography) to assemble and combine, media or materials traditional and modern (spray-paint) painting practices, with collage and sculptural assemblages. So let us turn now and look at "Jaws and White Dog." It is a strange image, somewhat surrealistic. Indeed the shark's jaws, were brought by the artist to Tel-Aviv beach, and thus were intended as part of a manipulated, staged surrealistic or assembled image, and yet the dog that appeared on the scene was caught in this scene accidentally, and Frank saw the moment and seized the opportunity to shoot. Thus, in a strange way, this image, albeit surrealistic in character, occurred was virtually there, was in fact a sort of virtual image, real and unreal, absurd. There is, no doubt, a violent threatening dimension, to this image; the shark's sharp and pointed teeth, the dog (the type of which is known for its ferociousness) face each other,confront one another. Although the shark's jaws and teeth are inanimate,they are threatening the dog that has entered the picture from the left. Its body is only half visible and the dog pulls its tense leash held by an unseen master. From another angle, there is something amusing in this situation, from this angle the dog contemplates the jaws almost philosophically, and gazes at the open shark's jaws that confront it. The fact that this dog resembles a pig is also funny and strange. Beside the successful, accidental "composition" of the main "characters" elements or things inside the frame, the color and texture of the work is important to mention. The white dog and jaws are plastic-three-dimension, sharp, and stand out against the sea, and a dramatic, emotionally-loaded view of an orange, fire-colored sunset reflected on the brilliant surface of the copper-like surface of the water. Significant is also the fact that the horizon is tilted. It adds to the dynamism and the other-worldly, surrealist quality of the work. So one can point clearly to Basil Frank's talent for radical "violent" or provocative gesture, his expressionist dimension or side, his sense for combining elements, and his richness of texture. This is an aspect of his great feeling for the various materials he uses in his sculptures and massive painted assemblages. The right choice or feeling for materials and scale can be seen also in the way Frank has chosen to laminate the photo and blow it up into the large size plastic object it has become. Finally, the content or meaning of this image is not to be overlooked, and it points to violence, something that surrounds us all, meditating on it - Frank is a socially and politically concerned artist. The Work of Basil Frank should, at least for the sake of discussion, be divided into two groups or categories: plastic works, i.e. works ranging or mixing painting and reliefs turning into sculpture and assemblages, and his photographs or photosculptures, as he calls them. Basil Frank's early work and student work was grounded in minimalism and post-minimalism. He did serial work, clean and restrained in his native South Africa and later in the 70s when studying in London at St. Martin's, was influenced by Anthony Caro's concrete formalist sculpture, which was a dominant force at that time. In South Africa, Frank was politically active opposing the regime ruled by a racist principle. I mention this because the direction his work took was expressionist in character and m ore literary and political in content, and is definitely closer to action painting and junk sculpture than to clean minimalist sculpture. In spite of the fact that his minimalism was closer to post-minimalism from the outset, i.e. softened somewhat and made the sculpture more complex. And yet, only in the 80s under the influence of Joseph Beuys, a conceptual-social sculptor whom he has met, Frank could see a way to give vent to his literary conceptual and political concerns and bent. He came up with an important series of collages, the "Blackboard" series. It was a generative series for Frank, who simulated Beuy's use of blackboards, and used words as concepts to think about written in white on a black pasted ground. He has written words like: "object", "system", "body", "word", "art". The work is gestural in nature, and texturally rich, there are red marks, arrows in red paint, texturally rough surfaces as well as golden satin fabric. The work is emotional, sensual as much as it is conceptual. The words do not pretend to present an idea, they are rather thought associations that give the viewer general directions - direct his/her thought. They fare within the entire work like any other material or textural element in the work. From here on, Frank's plastic work has assumed its own character. This includes the series like "Umbilical Africa," or more recently, "Head" and works made in reaction to the Gulf War experienced in Israel in 1991. This body of work, to my mind, should be noted for its bold inventive and imaginative use of method and means. Suffice to read the list of materials and techniques of almost any work to make this point clear; "Arrow" for example (1993/94) a wall piece (made after the aforementioned Gulf War) lists copper, chains, paint, canvas, woodbase, mirror, neon, copper wire, and glass. This is typical. These mixtures of materials and ready-made industrial objects (chains, bottles, pipes, etc.) express and bridge between the industrial, political, cultural or ecological and present an emotional reaction to a multi-systemic reality. This is a multi-cultural and material world the complexity and absurdity of which, as well as the potential power of destruction and/or salvation it contains, can best be seen or experienced in art, and in the state of a multi-media Junk-art object like Frank's. This object is Frank's advanced or enhanced (sometimes brutal or kinky) neo-collage and conceptual assemblage. In this catalogue, Basil Frank completes the information given on each reproduced work with a kind of suggested list of themes or free associations, or a suggested interpretation or reading. In the artist's text for a "Head" 1991 for example, a work from the "Head" series (texts that Frank referred to sometimes as "poems") one reads for example: "chains = chained thoughts, imprisonment, human rights, reflection of image - self importance, mirror-participation, communication, thats - psychical energy."In these texts I suggest, the artist provides us literally with an insight, or simply provides the viewer with a key into his language and its own rules of transformation, a key to how and what he means. This is no doubt interesting, and direct, generous toward the visual consumer, helpful and may be considered as part of the work. The second group of works are Frank's photos what he terms photosculptures. In these works Frank uses photographs he shot at various sites, building sites or any site which happened to provide him with the right sight for his special sensitivity for materials, or interest in structures, cables, chains, and ducts. It could be also a flame of fire or even a baroque piece of outdoor stone sculpture, or a bust of Julius Caesar in black marble, which he has juxtaposed with a photograph of a bloody flayed head of an ox or a cow. Mostly Frank manipulates various photographs into a constructed collage made up of several prints. He repeats an image and/or at times, repeats and combines disjunctive images. Frank's feeling for volume and sculptural space, for texture and matter, comes across in his photographs. He can thus succeed in his collage-placement and manipulation of his photos into his blown-up large photosculptures, which indeed project a high-resolution sculptural presence. This is an effective concept, which Frank is not the first to use (interestingly enough and relevant is the fact that minimalist conceptualist artist Sol Lewitt, for example, bypassed for a time his own sculptural minimalism and worked with photographs of architecture and traditional figurative sculpture). But Basil Frank gives it his own character and sculptural value, and these works fully justify their name as photosculptures. When laminated they make an effective and free artistic format, original and interesting.

Dr. Michael Sgan-CohenPh.D. City University of N.Y. (Jerusalem)

P.O.Box 4183,Jerusalem 91041Israel.Tel/Fax++972-26722871, e-mail:bcfrank@netvision.net.il