Sunday, August 5, 2012

As every artist knows, raising funding for the production of a new art piece, an exhibition, or a catalogue is one of the most difficult tasks around. There is not a lot of money available for art projects, and everyone wants a piece of the pie, so when a visiting American filmmaker raved about  www.kickstarter.com, a creative funding platform, I couldn’t wait to look at the site. (One of the current projects seeking funding is pictured above – Vincent Ward wants to mount an installation at the Shanghai Biennale).

The Kickstarter premise is that many people would like to financially support creative projects that appeal to them, but they don’t have much money to give. So donors can pledge as little as $5 – and the money will only go to the project if the target figure set by the artist is met by a certain date. Artists offer thank you gifts for donors – which might range from a special postcard to, if it is a really big donation, a listing as a producer in the credits of a film.

This week, the New Yorker carries a joke in which some prisoners are standing around in a prison yard, and one is saying: ‘Thanks to Kickstarter we’re building a tunnel’. Which shows the extent to which Kickstarter  has entered popular culture.

Most regrettably, Kickstarter is only available in the United States, because of the payment system. Damn. Won’t someone start it here?

Durant Basi Sihlali (SA 1935 - 2005)

 Lithograph, 

"Loading Coal" 

40 x 57 cm

Talking about artists and money … it has been sad to read recent stories in the Mail & Guardian about the lawyer who apparently has in his possession millions of rands worth of artworks left behind by Durant Sihlali after he died of a heart attack in 2004. The lawyer, Mafika Sihlali, who may or may not be related to the artist, is currently out on bail on a charge of defrauding the SABC, and nobody (except, presumably, the lawyer) knows quite where the paintings are. Durant Sihlali’s widow Anna has laid a charge of theft against the lawyer.

Sihlali was one of the country’s leading artists, and apart from the loss of income to his widow, the disapearance of his work is an enormous blow to the country’s cultural heritage. One can only hope that his paintings are safely in storage somewhere, and one day will reappear.

Sue Williamson    

Cheryl Carolus, 1990

59 x 39 cm 

Pigment inks on archival paper.

I have committed to a show on the Cape Town Month of Photography in September. The theme this year is Autobiography: Chronicles of Our Times. 

Although I have used photography in my work many times, it’s always been as part of a larger project: this is the first time I will show photographs by themselves. 

I decided to go back through all my old negatives, and print up portraits of women I have taken over the years. Some of the images I have seen up to now only as  postage stamp sized on a contact sheet … like this one, of Cheryl Carolus.

I took this in 1990, when Cheryl  was still very much the activist, before the years when she became South African High Commissioner in London and more recently, chairperson of SAA.