Friday, October 22, 2010

I suppose so many shows open towards the end of the month because pay
day is just around the corner and hope springs eternal in the breasts of the
galleries.

On Monday, photographer Tracey Derrick was one of three artists opening atthe AVA. “One in Nine – my Year as a Statistic’ is the documentation of her
experience in fighting breast cancer. Her weapons against the disease were
wigs, hats, and finally a triumphant tattoo on her body where her breast once
was.

Tracey Derrick

Across the street at Worldart, Ayanda Mabulu was showing his barbed
paintings of satirical social commentary on ‘Un-mute my tongue’.

Ayanda Mabulu

On Tuesday, the Michaelis Gallery was packed for the opening of Andrew Putter’s year long project as a Gipco fellow with his ‘Sketch Assembly’. Working with 30 ‘apprentices’ he unpicked and reconstituted the genre of Dutch paintings known as “Merry Company’ in order to revisit history and
impart to the group the nature of constructing a series of artworks. The documentation of the process is exhibited in the minutest detail.

Opening crowd at ‘Sketch Asembly’

"Sketch Assembly" - it’s in the detail

On Thursday, the Goodman Gallery launched an upbeat magazine-style catalogue by Kudzanai Chirui, entitled Black President . Works on paper by Kudzi lined the walls, – and in the darkened gallery space Chimurenga editor Ntone Edjabe was the dj

Andy and Claire Baronowski with Odidi at the Goodman

And down at the Michael Stevenson, it’s aluta continua as Jo Ractliffe exhibits her extraordinary black and white photographs, taken on a series of arduous journeys to the interior of Angola, evoking the war torn landscape in images of beauty and forlorn desolation.

Also in the space, Simon Gush is showing an elegant and eloquent four screen video entitled 4 for Four: A speculative montage for David Oistrakh and Sergei Prokofiev and Claire van Blerk and Kyle Morland surpise by
constructing an elevator in the side gallery.

Emma Bedford and Jo Ractliffe

That was the week that was.

Wednesday, October 13

In 1986, a year in which the end of apartheid was not yet in sight but the impetus of resisting the state was in full swing and somewhat fashionable, a shop called So Modern in Rockey Street, Yeoville, Johannesburg’s vibrant crossover suburb, invited me to design two ‘politically aware’ T-shirts for them.

For the first, I used a photograph which had appeared in a British newspaper of Nelson and Winnie Mandela on their wedding day, with some text. For the second, I made a colourful ‘rainbow-pull’ design incorporating the clauses of the Freedom Charter (unbanned in 1984, but still widely considered subversive). The trendy So Modern reacted with horror to both my designs, saying that to sell either of them would result in jail for all concerned.

So I and my partner at that time, Bruce Gordon, started to print and distribute the T-shirts ourselves, and uncounted hundreds were sold.

Wanted: a Freedom Charter T-shirt

Now the Museum of Modern Art in New York has asked for one of the Freedom Charter T-shirts for their collection of ephemeral material, to be displayed in a vitrine to support an exhibition of South African prints to open next March. But I no longer have one.

Does anyone still have a Freedom Charter T-shirt tucked away somewhere they would be prepared to donate/sell? If so, please email me at suewill@iafrica.com

Friday, October 8

I was in Berlin when New York artist Hank Willis Thomas’ show ‘All Things Being Equal’ opened at the Goodman Cape, and so I missed his walkabout, and it was only this week, as the exhibition draws to a close that I made it over there. I’m so glad I did. In spite of its incendiary themes of racism, the work is cool, very considered, and witty, and I will write more about it soon.

Hank Willis Thomas
All Things Being Equal 2010
Polished aluminium
104 x 194 cm

Several of the works were manufactured here through the Goodman Gallery – like the key phrase which is also the title of the show All Things Being Equal. This highly desirable piece is cast in gleaming aluminium, and hand finished to the same immaculate degree of perfection one expects to find in a luxury Italian car. Kendell Geers stated recently that it is now possible to fabricate artworks in South Africa which are the equal of anywhere else in the world, and Thomas’ exhibition definitely proves this point.

Art in America

I received an email this morning with advance PDFs of a four page feature in which South African Art Now is reviewed alongside Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agula’s Contemporary African Art since 1985 to appear soon in Art in America. So exciting! Look out for the issue with this cover.