July 21, 2013

This week was Nelson Mandela’s 95^th birthday, and the nation and the world celebrated. It was heartwarming to learn from the press that his grandchildren said he was sitting up in his hospital bed and smiling.

I thought back to 25 years ago, 1988, Madiba’s 70^th birthday.  He had been in jail for more than 20 years then, and whether he would ever be freed was still a matter of speculation.

In early July that year, Cape Town’s South newspaper, a weekly anti-apartheid tabloid, asked me to design a poster to honour Mandela’s birthday. It was against the law to publish a photograph of a prisoner, but I used a photocopy of one of the old Treason Trial era photos of Mandela,  and made a screenprinted frame in the style of the A Few South Africans series of women portraits.

That Friday, I couldn’t wait to get a copy of South and see the Mandela poster as the centre page spread. An announcement on the front page of South promised the poster within, but when I opened up the paper, the centre pages were a total blank. I couldn’t believe it.

I phoned the editor. It turned out that South was actually printed on The Argus presses each week. The South people knew that it was against the law to publish a picture of Mandela, so they tried that week to get The Argus  to print late at night, hoping no-one on their staff would notice the offending photo. But The Argus did notice, and refused. 

South decided to leave the centre pages blank as a protest. In any case, it was too late to substitute anything else.

I would have liked to have posted a picture of the never published poster on the blog today, a 25 year old tribute, but I hunted through my studio for several hours and I can’t find it. 

Sunday, June 30, 2013

At the recent Volta Art Fair, visitors taking the pink carpeted walkway into the interior could not escape reading this message: MY OTHER RIDE IS YOUR MOM.  Ed Young was at it again.  Volta runs concurrently to Art Basel, and focuses on up and coming artists and galleries, and inside the exhibition spaces, Young offered another profound sentiment: FUCK THE POOR.  A stuffed white bunny wore a MAC-lipsticked smile, and bumper stickers were available. For those who feared that the Volta loos might run out of toilet paper, a roll printed with an allover design of ED YOUNG hung on the wall as an emergency supply. Young did not himself go to Volta, but the SMAC Gallery reported back that some viewers loved the work and others hated it.

   

Talking of art fairs, Cape Town is getting its own, with the emphasis on ‘affordable’ art i.e. no work for sale will be priced over R50 000. The new venture is under the auspices of Fiera Milano Exhibitions Africa, organisers of the Good Food & Wine show, and the project manager is Kamey Butler. Dates are October 25 to 27 2013, and the venue is the Lookout Centre at the V&A Waterfront. The title of the new art fair, ‘Art For Me’, seems to pander a little too obviously to the aspirations of those who take the word ‘lifestyle’ seriously, but hey, there are many entries into the field of contemporary art. 

Bumped into AfrikaBurns organizer Robert Weinek this week. AfrikaBurns is, of course, the South African version of America’s legendary annual Burning Man event, with its extravagant creativity, its burning sculptures and a culture of free exchange. Since its inception in 2007, AfrikaBurns, held in the Tankwa Karoo, has developed its own set of legends, and camp followers, a devoted tribe which sees the limited tickets for the event sold out months in advance. Robert tells me that this year, a group of 40 AfrikaBurns-ites plus a sculpture of a full sized dinosaur have been invited to Burning Man. The South African sculptures go one step further than those seen at up to now at Burning Man – they are kinetic, so they not only burn they move!  

Raised eyebrow department

‘While it may seem like quite an imposing building with its stark white façade, towering Greek pillars and massive doors opening out onto the Company’s Gardens – the interior of the Iziko South African National Gallery is as warm and familiar as a Xhosa mud hut’ – extract from’ i on iziko’ newsletter received by email this week.