Wednesday, November 3, 2010

I had an amazing week last week, finally going somewhere I have wanted to go for ages: up to Mpumulanga to spend a week in the White River studio of The Artist’s Press, under the direction of Mark Attwood. The setting is gorgeous, and totally different from Cape Town: a ridiculously lush subtropical garden filled with birds like lilac breasted rollers and paradise flycatchers.

Tamar Mason, Sheila Flynn, Mark Attwood, Colbert Mashile, Fred Clark and Josie Grindrod round the lunch table at The Artist’s Press

In the spacious studio. there are three Tamarind master printers on hand – Mark himself and Leshoko and Syneth - to facilitate the messy business of printing. Mark runs monoprint workshops from time to time, limited to five or six artists, and this was one of those.

The print studio

I trained as a printmaker, and after years of working in installation, video or photography, it is great to get back to the immediate satisfaction of painting an image on a surface, (in this case, a sheet of polycarbonate) placing it on the bed of the press, with a piece of paper face down, sending it through, then peeling back the paper to see what is there. Polycarbonate is an unsympathetic surface to work on, and the effects can be splashy, but as with all concentrated workshops, one seems to progress much faster than in one’s home studio, where email and the phone are constant interruptions.

An experimental monoprint portrait

I came back to Cape Town dying to make more prints.

Friday, October 22, 2010

I suppose so many shows open towards the end of the month because pay
day is just around the corner and hope springs eternal in the breasts of the
galleries.

On Monday, photographer Tracey Derrick was one of three artists opening atthe AVA. “One in Nine – my Year as a Statistic’ is the documentation of her
experience in fighting breast cancer. Her weapons against the disease were
wigs, hats, and finally a triumphant tattoo on her body where her breast once
was.

Tracey Derrick

Across the street at Worldart, Ayanda Mabulu was showing his barbed
paintings of satirical social commentary on ‘Un-mute my tongue’.

Ayanda Mabulu

On Tuesday, the Michaelis Gallery was packed for the opening of Andrew Putter’s year long project as a Gipco fellow with his ‘Sketch Assembly’. Working with 30 ‘apprentices’ he unpicked and reconstituted the genre of Dutch paintings known as “Merry Company’ in order to revisit history and
impart to the group the nature of constructing a series of artworks. The documentation of the process is exhibited in the minutest detail.

Opening crowd at ‘Sketch Asembly’

"Sketch Assembly" - it’s in the detail

On Thursday, the Goodman Gallery launched an upbeat magazine-style catalogue by Kudzanai Chirui, entitled Black President . Works on paper by Kudzi lined the walls, – and in the darkened gallery space Chimurenga editor Ntone Edjabe was the dj

Andy and Claire Baronowski with Odidi at the Goodman

And down at the Michael Stevenson, it’s aluta continua as Jo Ractliffe exhibits her extraordinary black and white photographs, taken on a series of arduous journeys to the interior of Angola, evoking the war torn landscape in images of beauty and forlorn desolation.

Also in the space, Simon Gush is showing an elegant and eloquent four screen video entitled 4 for Four: A speculative montage for David Oistrakh and Sergei Prokofiev and Claire van Blerk and Kyle Morland surpise by
constructing an elevator in the side gallery.

Emma Bedford and Jo Ractliffe

That was the week that was.

Wednesday, October 13

In 1986, a year in which the end of apartheid was not yet in sight but the impetus of resisting the state was in full swing and somewhat fashionable, a shop called So Modern in Rockey Street, Yeoville, Johannesburg’s vibrant crossover suburb, invited me to design two ‘politically aware’ T-shirts for them.

For the first, I used a photograph which had appeared in a British newspaper of Nelson and Winnie Mandela on their wedding day, with some text. For the second, I made a colourful ‘rainbow-pull’ design incorporating the clauses of the Freedom Charter (unbanned in 1984, but still widely considered subversive). The trendy So Modern reacted with horror to both my designs, saying that to sell either of them would result in jail for all concerned.

So I and my partner at that time, Bruce Gordon, started to print and distribute the T-shirts ourselves, and uncounted hundreds were sold.

Wanted: a Freedom Charter T-shirt

Now the Museum of Modern Art in New York has asked for one of the Freedom Charter T-shirts for their collection of ephemeral material, to be displayed in a vitrine to support an exhibition of South African prints to open next March. But I no longer have one.

Does anyone still have a Freedom Charter T-shirt tucked away somewhere they would be prepared to donate/sell? If so, please email me at suewill@iafrica.com

Friday, October 8

I was in Berlin when New York artist Hank Willis Thomas’ show ‘All Things Being Equal’ opened at the Goodman Cape, and so I missed his walkabout, and it was only this week, as the exhibition draws to a close that I made it over there. I’m so glad I did. In spite of its incendiary themes of racism, the work is cool, very considered, and witty, and I will write more about it soon.

Hank Willis Thomas
All Things Being Equal 2010
Polished aluminium
104 x 194 cm

Several of the works were manufactured here through the Goodman Gallery – like the key phrase which is also the title of the show All Things Being Equal. This highly desirable piece is cast in gleaming aluminium, and hand finished to the same immaculate degree of perfection one expects to find in a luxury Italian car. Kendell Geers stated recently that it is now possible to fabricate artworks in South Africa which are the equal of anywhere else in the world, and Thomas’ exhibition definitely proves this point.

Art in America

I received an email this morning with advance PDFs of a four page feature in which South African Art Now is reviewed alongside Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agula’s Contemporary African Art since 1985 to appear soon in Art in America. So exciting! Look out for the issue with this cover.

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

View from the Churchhaven cottage

How beautiful is it to be tapping out this blog gazing out over the turquoise waters of a lagoon, the sun warming my legs and binoculars at my right hand to focus more clearly on a long pink drift of flamingoes wading on the other side. A little stripey mouse has just run right in front of me, but must not be allowed to enter the cottage as other members of his/her family have already chewed chunks out of a sheet, a sarong and a crocheted bedspread this weekend. I am at Churchhaven, 90 minutes up the west coast from Cape Town, and will post some pix when I get back to town tomorrow. If I can tear myself away.

Friday, September 17, 2010

O.K. So no more travelling for a while.

I got back into my apartment after the long flight back from London via Dubai at 6.30 p.m. on the Saturday before last, and by 7.30 p.m. I was in the Africa Café, having dinner with Emma Bedford, Johnnetta Cole, director of the Museum of African Art in Washington and chief curator Chris Kreamer. Powerhouse Johnnetta had also flown in that day and was actually leaving again the next – her trip had been cut short by an invitation for Tuesday from Michelle Obama, but today she and Chris have had a tour of the SANG ‘Pierneef to Gugulective’ show with Riaison Naidoo. An excellent way to get an overview of South African art.

Mary Sibande and Mustafa Maluka at the SANG

It’s a week of curators. On Thursday it’s dinner with Colin Richards, Penny Siopis, Rory Bester and Okwui Enwezor. Okwui is making a start on a new show of South African photography for the New York Institute of Contemporary Photography. I tell Okwui I have recently refused an invitation from Performa to be on a panel with him in New York in October because I won’t be there then.

“Why don’t you participate by Skype?’ he says. ‘I recently delivered a whole lecture at the Tate Modern by Skype’. Trying to answer questions from a well informed New York audience while staring at a screen? The idea is totally unnerving.

Saturday is the 9th anninversary of 9/11, and at Kathryn Smith’s serialworks, forensic artist William Scarbrough is opening a new show, entitled 'The Forgotten'. A faded newspaper column tells the story of a terrorist attack which demolished two gas towers in Brooklyn earlier on that fateful day … television news footage of the time tells the story of this event which soon became overshadowed by the attack on the Twin Towers.

William Scarbrough’s ‘The Forgotten’ (video detail)

‘The Forgotten’ (installation detail)

There are eerie photographs of the reconstructed photographs of the dead. Scarbrough’s presentation is masterly.

Definitely worth the trip up the four flights of stairs to serialworks.

Friday, September 10

Berlin … an amazing city. It has a real energy, but also a looseness, a laidback feeling. Berliners don’t like to look they are trying too hard.
The line that came up in the workshop as the one which best expresses what it really means to live in Berlin, is, IT’S A BIT SUSPICIOUS IF YOU HAVE TOO MUCH MONEY. It feels right, but it’s a very long sentence to photograph.

The first attempt at the shoot is on the steps of the tower on Alexanderplatz. But the light is not good. And there are other problems.

A test shot on the Alexamderplatz

The rest of the week is spent looking for a better location.

One night I visit Berlin-based Candice Breitz, in her studio, and she interrupts her marathon editing of her twins project long enough to head out for a supper of Chinese dumplings at her local.

Candice Breitz

On my last day in Berlin, we shoot again, on the steps of the Reichstag.
The rain stops just in time, and everyone shows up for the shoot. The only problem is … the security police, who half way through the shoot, object to us holding up letters.

After intense negotiation, they allow us to continue. Except that we may not hold the letters up. We may, however, stand there empty handed. Pretending we are holding letters up. It’s going to be interesting working this one out …

Box lunch with Lisa Brice in the Tate Modern members room.

So it’s on to London. It’s great to catch up with Lisa Brice again, and the Alice Neel portrait show at the Whitechapel is fantastic. So is the Francis Alys, at the Tate Modern. And the sun doesn’t stop shining.

Francis Alys’ rubber mat installation at the Tate Modern