January 29, 2010

What happens when an artwork supposed to go on a show can't be found?

On Thursday of last week, Storm, the director of the Goodman Cape, phoned me about the whereabouts of a charcoal drawing I'd made in situ in 1989, in Cradock in the Eastern Cape. This drawing was scheduled to go a show called 'The Marks We Make'. I reminded Storm that the gallery had had the drawing to show to a client.

The drawing was of four graves, simple mounds of stone, marked with little boards with the names of the Cradock Four, activists murdered by the police in 1985. Some of you might recall the photograph of David Goldblatt's that shows the graves as they are today. The mounds of stone have gone and been replaced by what officialdom considers an appropriate memorial - really ugly structures of brick and marble surrounded by a high fence.

I had a photostat of the drawing in the studio, so Storm came over to get it to help the gallery staff track the missing work down.

The show was to open at noon on Saturday, so I phoned Storm that morning to find out if they had traced the work. Apparently not. But the photostat had been taken to Cape Town's master scanner, Tony Meintjes to scan, and Tony had made a print from it.

This meant of course, that all the midtones in the original drawing would have disappeared, as they had not been picked up on the photostat. I went to look at the print, wondering if we should just not take it down altogether. But it didn't look too bad. Very graphic.

And at the opening William Kentridge came up and was complimentary about the work, saying he liked the print both "as a drawing and as a trace of a lost drawing". William is so articulate. And of course, a lot of his own work is about erasures and the incomplete images which remain.

And since the graves themselves are completely different now, perhaps the drawing of the original graves getting lost and having to be reproduced through an old photostat is another of those cases where life imitates art ...