Friday, April 22, 2011

I arrive in London the day before the South African photographic show, ‘Figures and Fictions’, opens at the Victoria & Albert Museum. The show has had terrific pre publicity, with an eight page spread in the London Sunday Times. On Monday April 11, Lisa Brice and I head for the opening. Some of the artists are here – Terry Kurgan, Lolo Veleko and Pieter Hugo – and it is good to catch up with locals art historian Annie Coombes and artist Joy Gregory. ArtThrob’s international editor Amy Halliday is there, and so, of course, is curator Tamar Garb. The show has great energy.

Zwelethu Mthethwa’s Untitled from The Brave Ones series at the V&A

Across town, dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has filled the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern with more than 100,000,000 porcelain sunflower seeds, each handformed and painted by 1600 porcelain workers in the town of Jingdizhen over a two year period.

Ai Weiwei with Sunflower Seeds at the Tate Modern

Simply called ‘Sunflower Seeds’ the piece has many layers of meaning, During Mao’s cultural revolution, sunflower seeds were often the only food available, so they are both a symbol of repression, and of a small way of sharing in those austere times.

On April 3, Ai Weiwei was arrested at the airport as he attempted to leave mainland China for Hong Kong. An international outcry has followed. The Chinese authorities refuse to release him and have said he was arrested for tax evasion.

Earlier this week, I signed a petition calling for his release. Today Good Friday, comes the news that the change.org site is under cyber attack from within China, evidence that the petition is working. Here is the link. Please sign, http://www.change.org/petitions/call-for-the-release-of-ai-weiwei

Sunday, April 17, 2011

My last Thursday in New York is even busier than usual, trying to catch up with as many people as I can before heading for JFK.

Breakfast is at Le Pain Quotidien on Broadway at 91st with artist friend Michael Waugh whose exhibition at Romero Schroeder & Shredder I visited last week. His installation, The Accumulation of Capital, takes on the task of turning this economic concept into art. Over a period of six months, Waugh filmed himself packing up the varied and eclectic contents of nine generations of his family’s china and glassware cabinets now spread out on the floor of the gallery. The video voiceover discusses theories of capitalist accumulation.

More at www.michaelwaugh.com.

Michael Waugh’s The Accumulation of Capital.

Lunch is with Linda Marston-Reid at the elegant Maya Lin designed headquarters of the Rockfeller Foundation, floating above the city. Linda is the coordinator of the Bellagio Center in Italy, and the purpose of the lunch is to discuss my upcoming residency at Bellagio, due to start in May.

At 4 p.m. I have a date with acclaimed film maker Susan Vogel who is waiting for me next to an Urs Fischer sculpture of a yellow teddy bear merged with a desk lamp, made by the artist with the aid of a 3D laser scanner. Teddy has been installed that very day outside the classic Seagram Building on Park Avenue, prior to a September auction date.

Susan Vogel and the Urs Fischer teddy bear

Susan has just completed a remarkable film on the artist El Anatsui, Fold Crumple Crush, a tribute to the Ghanaian artist whose intricate wall hangings fashioned from discarded bottle tops have made this late career artist an international art star. View the trailer online at vimeo.com/16874224

Monday, April 11. 2011

Monday, April 11. 2011

New York, I love it.

The subway system. Rushing you express from 96th Street way downtown to the Village in about 15 minutes, providing a series of small performances along the way that the residents of the city mostly ignore.

On the subway

Central Park. When I arrived towards the end of March, signs of spring were just beginning and the weather was snowy, but now brilliant yellow forsythia is coming into full bloom and lighting the way towards summer.

Dusk in Central Park

The theatres. Entering the Lincoln Center one night with friends Joe and Anne Bacal to see War Horse , a play they had booked for us and I knew nothing about, I encountered the remarkable artistry of Cape Town puppet maestros Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler. The play concerns a beloved horse who is shipped to France to play a role on the battlefield in WW1. The cast was brilliant, but undoubtedly the stars of the play were the life size horses, quivering and snorting, pawing and rearing, more real, more sensitive than the human cast.

War Horse

New York. I was there for almost three weeks, but the days were so full of incident, of events, of people, of me trying to get a New York version of my art project Other Voices Other Cities done, there was no time to stop and blog. Over the next week, I will be looking back at some of the best moments.