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Last night Avant Car Guard staged their second performance at David Krut Projects, one in a series of interventions the three-man art collective has staged in recent years.

Jan-Henri Booyens, Zander Blom and Michael McGarry are all artists in their own right, but Avant Car Guard seems to give them permission to question art-world structures and generally be more riotous than is possible in their individual practices. At 18:30, after a photo shoot – after all much of Avant Car Guard’s work is photographic – the performance starts. The art-collective-as-band emerges from the large black shape in the centre of the gallery with two electric guitars and a drum set, and the music starts. And ‘music’ is used loosely here for the improvisation that follows – at times cacophony, then moving into harmony and, finally, the three artists ‘jam’ together with apparent abandon.

The words ‘art’, ‘rock’ and ‘vibes’ form a triangle on the posters behind Avant Car Guard and the relationship is indeed central. When they launched Volume 1 (a book on their work) at David Krut Projects last year, they referred to it as an album. The LP format catalogue in a sleeve looked the part, and the artists signed copies housed in a cardboard pirate ship and surrounded by smoke courtesy of the smoke machine. It was all very Rock star. The intersection of art, rock music and ‘vibes’ becomes a way to consider the role of the artist in society, traditional art production and the art celebrity. Their method, in their own words, is “a sincere act to invent something insincere”, and is concerned with pushing the boundaries and questioning expectations of what constitutes art and art power in South Africa.

Keywords: Avant Car Guard