This little piggy went to art

WORDS Debbie Loots PHOTOS Andrew Griffin


Greg Streak has scribbled empty 312 blue ballpoint pens on a canvas, crumpled up densely-doodled paper, sewed together lots of R10 notes to fold into pigs, all in the name of art. He explains the thinking behind his doing.

Who is Greg Streak?

Not sure. I think he is still trying to work that out himself!

Tell us about your solo exhibition at Commune1 Gallery, Seeing Red, Feeling Blue.

The show was made over a time in which I was reflecting on many things. I knew it was not going to be your standard exhibition; a clear running narrative either with continuity created through use of a material or one specific concept. This was intentional. So I suppose the title of the show attempts to preempt what you are going to see, which is ponderings and questions that sit in the spaces between anger and resignation, participation and retraction, hope and despair, etc. I wasn’t interested in making a clear thematic. I didn’t want it to be an easy ride. I wanted the connections between things to be tenuous, even non-existent if that’s how it came out. I don’t see the world as a place of linear order or easy connections, which is how we would maybe like it to be. I see it as a chaotic space full of hypocrisy and contradiction, and I wanted to explore this in whatever direction it took me. The theme, if one wants to pin it down in some way, is one that is dismissive and searching, rather than stable and clear.

What is behind the three green porkies in your works And this little piggy?

The pigs are each made from 300 R10-notes, stitched together, then folded origami-style and placed onto a mild steel armature framework. They are then stuffed with foam batting and stitched together with white cotton thread – almost sutured together like a cadaver. The pigs now look bloated. The work comes as a version of three as they differ: each have slightly different pitches, angles and forms, but also, they are made from different currency variables. One entirely from old R10 notes, the other new R10 notes and the last, a mixture of the two.

The work sets up many obvious and not so obvious tensions. The pig, symbol of greed, is made from real money, the root of all evil. The work talks to the value of the real money, now destroyed through the stitching; what is this value we place on green pieces of paper? It references the phenomenon of ukukhothana – a township spectacle where boasters try to out do one another by wasting money as extravagantly or as decadently as the other. In some situations a R1 000 T-shirt is bought and then directly burned – simultaneously a showing of wealth as well as a total disregard for it.

The work also makes reference to the collapse of the global economy, in which greed and money brought the worlds financial stability to its knees. Not to mention bringing into question the art market and its own set of values and variables; sometimes a world of lunacy and disproportionate values plucked out of thin air. As mentioned, there are three little pigs and, in an upturned economy, aren’t we all struggling to keep the wolf from door (no matter how hard he huffs and puffs)?

Are the blue ballpoint doodle works for real?

Yup, all for real. The largest of these works Doodle for Cathedra measures 4 470 x 2 000mm and is a to-scale replica of a painting by Barnett Newman called Cathedra made in 1951. It’s very densely articulated with ballpoint scribble on canvas, that at a distance reads as paint. It took 312 royal blue ballpoint pens to achieve this sort of surface, and obviously some serious, mindless hours.

What are you up to next?

I have just sent a work to Amsterdam for a site-specific installation show. It will be shown behind the glass window of a 300sqm empty retail space in the Zeilstraat in a suburb of Amsterdam. The work is titled To Rent: Remains Of The Cash Cow and is a twice life-size sculpture of a severed cows head, cast in resin and fibreglass and covered in real 5-euro notes. I will also have work at the Johannesburg Art Fair in September, but for next while I want to take my micro creative consultancy, Source Creative, to another level by fine-tuning my workshops on Creative Thinking and Progressive Business Model strategy.

www.gregstreak.com, www.sourcecreative.co.za, www.garagedesignlab.com, www.doprojects.net