Will the goldfish make it? This thought preoccupies most of the viewers watching artist Bronwyn Lace disassemble her exhibit. Occupying a small studio inside Johannesburg's Bag Factory artists commune, the work comprises a fishbowl suspended by an elaborate weave of fish gut. The blindfolded artist slowly, exaggeratedly severs the gut with her teeth.
Will the goldfish make it? No-one is more preoccupied with this than a young woman with brown pinstripe coat, faded jeans and lip ring. As Lace musically plucks the taut gut, then bites it, the woman routinely steps out to save the fish. But the bowl doesn't drop - at least, not yet.
Elsewhere in the Bag Factory, which for a single evening has become a carnival-like environment dedicated to performance, young artists are similarly mucking about. Anthea Moys, wearing a black leotard and red sweatband, leads a group of six young women through an aerobics routine.
THE EVENT
 An Evening of Performance Art was hosted by The Bag Factory Artists' Studios, 10 Mahlatini Street, Fordsburg, Johannesburg, on August 8
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It's fun to watch. Everyone smiles. The scene recalls Spike Jonze's music video for Fatboy Slim's 1998 song "Praise you", a deadpan documentary-style report of a group of amateur dancers performing their unintentionally mistimed routine to the hit song outside a California cinema.
Further suggesting the influence of pop culture on these formally highbrow experiments in art-making is a performance by Debbie Rogers. All we see of her is live feed of the bare-chested artist on a TV screen. Bart Simpson-style, she writes out a line repeatedly across a blackboard. It is punishment for being "a good girl".
What gives this work its charm is the fact that Rogers, the flesh and blood version, is actually right there, behind a curtain. We hear the chalk on the board. We see her silhouette. We want to sneak a peek, but nobody does.
While most of the performances are solipsistic, the audience incidental to their unfolding, Malvern Makhonya explicitly acknowledges his audience. Standing in the doorway to a darkened studio space, dressed in white hooded sweater and camouflage flak jacket, a black stocking pulled over his face for effect, he stares at the passing audience. That's it. He doesn't move. Someone giggles. A camera flashes. He just stands there, an expressionless threat.
Makhonya's work bears up what Adrian Henri, writing in 1974 at the peak of the performance boom, described as the merging of art, life, artist and work into a singular awkward, fleeting gesture. While this collapsing of boundaries has resulted in some dubious presentations - Austrian Hermann Nitsch's blood rituals - the young artists assembled here keep it clean.
The only hint of blood and entrails is contained in a series of photographs displayed by John Thom, who organised the evening's events. His pedigree as course leader is beyond doubt. A few years ago he disturbed the polite air of Brett Kebble's art awards by arriving at the exhibition opening wearing a suit of lead pencils, bristling like a porcupine.
Waiting for the fish bowl to collapse, Thom whispers an observation. Many of the young artists on this workshop don't typically do performance. Lace, for example, previously exhibited her fishbowl piece as a static installation. Tonight she is animating it.
Another piece of gut snaps, the bowl lurches and plunges to the floor. Smash. A fish flaps on the floor. Someone jumps forward. Did the goldfish make it? I didn't follow the young woman running off into a cold August night with a fish in hand.
