Sunday, May 30, 2010

For the last three months I have been working on a public art commission for Cape Town airport – an artwork now inscribed on the thirty metre glass wall at the back of the new IRT bus station. This bus service will carry arriving and departing passengers between the Civic Centre and the airport – a long awaited necessity.

Standing inside the station, looking through the glass, one can see Table Mountain just visible above a messy foreground of rent a car companies. My brief was to make a work which engaged with this view of the mountain, and also with the political and social history of Cape Town.

My solution was to work on both sides of the glass. From the road, or bus side, one can see a landscape of the Peninsula as it can be seen from a high point of the airport, stretching from Muizenberg to Signal Hill, and the sea. Clouds float over this landscape.

Sandblasting the landscape into the glass through stencils.

View of the artwork from the road

The piece is called A Random History of Cape Town, 1499-1994, and passengers on the inside of the bus station can read text inscribed on to the clouds. These texts are quotes from the journals of people from Vasco da Gama through Lady Anne Barnard to Ahmed Kathrada and Nelson Mandela, and range from the poetic and informative to the slightly shocking.
Detail of the clouds from the inside.

Actually, the work is not quite finished. A few of the quotes were considered too liable to cause offence and I am looking for some new ones to complete the piece.

But next time you are at the airport, have a look.

Monday, May 17

I’ve had an email from Signe Bergstrom, my editor at HarperCollins New York with some interesting news. There is to be an e-book version of South African Art Now, the large sized hardcover overview of contemporary art in this country which was launched in October last year.

The book is going electronic!

Signe explained that with the launch of the Apple i-Pad, technology has caught up with the reproduction of colour images. The first electronic device designed as a hand held device which would allow e-books to be read page by page was The Kindle, (which became available in South Africa late last year, at a cost of about R3000). The problem with The Kindle was that it could handle black and white text and images only.

Now that the Apple i-Pad is here with its groundbreaking full colour technology, HarperCollins is in the process of converting all their titles to an e-book format. The permissions form HarperCollins required artists signed to allow reproduction of their works in the book anticipated this development, and covered electronic reproduction.

Of course, the i-Pad costs a bit more than The Kindle, and is being advertised online here at R7599. But it would be nice to carry round your entire library in your pocket.

In the meantime, the book (the one with paper pages) continues to sell nicely in the States, garnering reviews in such unlikely publications as Urban Ink ‘the Tattoo magazine for people of color’.

Sunday, May 9

So who is watching ‘A Country Imagined’ at 9 p.m. on Sunday nights? SABC2?
Two years in the making, this 13 part series of one hour programmes is hosted by Johnny Clegg, and produced by Curious Pictures, with writing by the excellent Tracy Murinik. If you are one of those artists (like me) who keeps meaning to get into your car and drive off into the country for an extended trip to see what and who is out there, this series will strengthen that resolve.
Host Johnny Clegg


Tonight was the Karoo segment, and the landscape footage was breathtaking. The relaxed and engaging Clegg, who is an anthropologist as well as a musician, talks about photographers David Goldblatt, and Mikhael Subotzky and the context of their work in places like Die Hell and Beaufort West and visits actress Antoinette Pienaar, who for the past four years has been living with 91 year old herbalist and sheepherder Johannes Willemse to learn his skills. There is footage from the other worldly Afrika Burns music festival in its desolate setting, and in a David Kramer-esque moment, Clegg meets a group of four musicians on string instruments who play for the ‘Sandskoppers’ – a group of dancers, dressed in bright yellow and green who kick up the sand with their fast and fancy footwork.

Perfect viewing for a Sunday evening, and there are ten episodes of this major series to go.
A Mikhael Subotzky photograph from the Beaufort West series

Monday, April 26, 2010

A lot of you have been asking why ArtThrob has not reviewed Spier Contemporary yet. I know. The review is coming. I’ve just been so incredibly busy trying to complete a commission to make an artwork which reads from both sides of a 30 metre glass wall at the IRT station at Cape Town airport, here beautifully illuminated from the road side by the rising sun. There are 26 panels which must be sandblasted and in some cases painted from both sides. And of course it’s all got to be finished for the World Cup. But more about that another time.
The glass wall at Cape Town airport

Back to Spier. I have walked round the show three times, wondering quite what to say. I thought of doing a whole review just on the labeling of the images with the artist’s statements, many of which could be entered for a most cringe worthy of the year contest. There is a terrible self consciousness, and an earnestness which pervades overall, and which does not sit well with what art should be. To say nothing of the grammar.

A label from Spier Contemporary

Take this one, which accompanies a photograph of a grimacing man holding a dead white rabbit. ‘In this self portrait I AM holding a dead white rabbit and dressed in an academic gown, this comments on MY struggles for employment as an art lecturer at a higher education institution. The belief is, the struggle is because of skin colour. The ‘Crazy Store’ frame makes reference to the strained financial implications of being an academic.’

One’s understandable reaction to reading this drivel might be, Get another job, dude. But speaking generally, South African artists have to get rid of the idea that spelling out every nuance of every thought that goes through their mind in making a piece has to be shared with their public.

The work must stand on its own, and be open to a variety of readings.

Saturday, April 17

I never miss a William Kentridge lecture if I can help it. William really has a way of explaining his working processes in such a way that one can continue to learn from him. At the Gipca lecture at Michaelis last week, he talked about his approach to turning Gogol’s story ‘The Nose’ into a new version of Shoshkatovich’s opera.
William Kentridge at Michaelis

This approach is a process of sedimentation – taking in ideas through reading, seeing, listening, reacting. And layering these ideas. In Gogol’s story “The Nose’, about a nose which leaves its owner to live a life of its own, there is no horse. But William liked the idea of putting the nose on horseback. So of course, the nose on horseback became a part of the opera. One has to work to justify the image through the concept, say Kentridge.
The Nose on horseback

Kentridge’s opera opened at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in March, the same month that his retrospective opened at MoMA. Surely a first for any artist. Over drinks after the lecture, William told me the MoMA show was pulling in a record 6000 visitors a day. Incredible.
Donna Kukama performs

This week’s highlight was the opening of the new National Gallery exhibition. Incoming director Riason Naidoo closed the gallery for six weeks to rehang the permanent collection in a show called From Pierneef to Gugulective. Big crowd. Lots of work on the walls. Looking good on first walkthrough. Samoosas and music in a marquee outside. And Donna Kukama giving a really engaging performance as a speechless museum spokesperson – pushing round a trolley of noisemaking machines, attracting the attention of visitors by blowing a whistle, lots of body language signals, writing her interpretations of works on a little board.

Tuesday, March 30

The Joburg Art Fair is over for another year, and energy wise, it was the best year ever. Thank you everyone who came to the ArtThrob stand and bought prints from the Editions for ArtThrob series. You will be keeping us going for many months ahead!

Here's a picture round up to conclude:

Mary Sibanda gives an artist's talk

A cleaner sweeps her way past Sibanda's archetypal mounted Sophie figure

Clive van den Berg, with his new lithograph for ArtThrob, Cyber Erotics

The ArtThrob stand, with team members Chantal Louw and Natasha Norman


The Goodman Gallery stand, with Wendy MacDonald, Liza Essers, Neil Dundas and Bethea Frank
Storm Janse van Rensburg, Tracey Rose and Tracy Murinik with Mia

Sunday, March 29

On Saturday at the Joburg Art Fair the highlighted event was the keynote speech by invited guest, Klaus Biesenbach, Director of PS1 in New York, and curator at large at MoMA. No title for this speech appeared on the programme, no theme, and perhaps this was the problem. The suave curator appeared to be speaking from the hip.

Klaus Biesenbach in Johannesburg

Biesenbach opened his attack by saying 'I don't like art fairs' where you can 'buy things to carry back under your arms', contrasting them to biennales, under the direction of a single curator, which provide 'an incredibly important way for people to talk'. He did concede that an art fair 'might be bearable and useful in a city like Johannesburg, where there is an art scene.' His audience, largely only too well aware of the differences in intent of an art fair and a biennale, was not receptive to this prescriptive approach.

William Kentridge, with whom Biesenbach has worked closely on Kentridge's current exhibition at MoMA, responded from the floor that the Joburg Art Fair was obviously not a biennale, but whatever its limitations, for the art community of the country, it was 'our best and only meeting point', where artists and curators gather to talk and see what is going on.

And so saying, Kentridge summed up what seemed to be the general feeling about this year's Art Fair. Of course there is the usual component of less than great work, but overall there is much to see, the contributions from foreign galleries are welcome, and one feels the big galleries have gone to considerable trouble to present new work from their top artists.

And it is a real opportunity to talk, even informally.