Saturday, December 18

‘If money were no object, which one would you choose?’ Blank project director Jonathan Garnham and I were walking around Dorothee Kreutzveldt’s opening of “The Imminent Inauguration of the Fifth Corner’. Kreutzveldt’s edgy brushwork reflects the fast changing often makeshift street landscape of downtown Johannesburg. ‘Hard to choose’, I respond. ‘And it’s not just a question of money. It’s wall space.’ ‘I sometimes think I should buy an old house in the Karoo with big rooms just to hang work I like’, says Jonathan.

Dorothee Kreutzveldt’s painting Two Men on a Bench photographed in downtown Johannesburg

For such a pleasurable imagined house – and for those who do have real available wall space - there was lots to choose from on the shows opening in the last two weeks. At Joao Ferreira’s, Kate Gottgens’ “merry hell and the dreambody’ presented family photos reworked into haunting paintings of a somewhat fearful childhood world.

Kate Gottgens and Andrew Putter at Joao Ferreira

The end of year graduate show at Michaelis looked better than ever – clearly, the appointment of a full time curator for the Michaelis Gallery, Nadja Daehnke, has added to the highly professional look of the show, which snakes through the entire complex. And the students themselves raised R200 000 to pay for their catalogue. Jared Ginsburg walked away with the Michaelis prize.

On the Michaelis show: Rose Kotze Staying at a Friend (Club Bliss, Claremont) | 2010 (detail)

And finally, ‘Category Error’ opened at the AVA on Monday night, an invigorating group show with artists Josie Grindrod, Joanne Block, Lynne Lomofsky, Mandy Darling, Jane Solomon, Leora Lewis, Jann Cheifitz and Philip Miller, with an exhibition of prints upstairs from Warren Editions. Large scale monoprints included work from Michael Taylor Sanell Aggenbach and Georgina Gratrix.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

You know Christmas is coming in Cape Town when cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro aka Zapiro launches his annual collection of hit-them-where-it-hurts-most cartoons. ‘Them’ being South Africa’s politicians, who continue to supply Zapiro with a never ending source of outrageous material. A New York academic told me recently that no American cartoonist would ever dare to pen a cartoon in which the president was unbuckling his pants to rape a supine Justice, but Zapiro did just that in September 2008. And shrugged off the multi million rand defamation suit Jacob Zuma brought against him.

Zapiro’s controversial Mail & Guardian cartoon

This year’s collected cartoon book, published by Jacana Media, is called Do You Know Who I Am? And if you don’t know who is saying that, you’d better buy the book.

Over the last decade, the cartoon characters have also evolved into puppets, stars of a satirical news programme featuring such well known characters as Julius Malema, Zuma, Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Tutu and Helen Zille, The programme is called zanews. It’s hilarious. But don’t look for it on SABC. They refuse to screen it. You can view it only on the internet at www.zanews.co.za. Or on DVD -– a great idea in a country where the internet is so slow.

Jacob Zuma and Helen Zille on zanews.co.za

In his speech , Shapiro told the story of his nervousness at whether Tutu would like the puppet of himself, with his hooked nose and jutting chin greatly exaggerated. He needn’t have worried. Recently, Tutu phoned Shapiro to ask if the puppet could stand in for him at an event he was invited to, but could not attend.

Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Tutu and Jonathan Shapiro