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.

Thursday, March 24

I lived in New York for five years in my twenties. I was working as an advertising copywriter for the agency Benton & Bowles, and my office was on the 12th floor of the steel studded Tishman Building, 666 Fifith Avenue. The side entrance of the building was on West 53rd Street, diagonally opposite the entrance to MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art, and sometimes at lunch times I would slip across the street to sit in the room lined with Monet’s mesmerizing paintings of the waterlilies at Giverny.

I was at the very beginning of my career as an artist then, taking my first life-drawing classes ever one night a week with John Groth at the Art Students League of New York, and never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that one day my own work would be exhibited in the self same museum.
The opening night crowd at MoMA

That moment arrived, last night, with the opening of Impressions: Prints from South Africa 1965 to Now, curated by MoMA’s Judy Hecker. My 1990 piece, For Thirty Years Next to his Heart has never been hung better (a perfect grid) and ephemera included postcards, a magazine project and the Freedom Charter T-shirt.

The snowy view from my bedroom this morning

Unseasonal snow and hail prevented many people from making it to the opening, but faces familiar to South Africans included Petra Mason, Jann Cheifitz and Tony Karon, Julie McGee, Jack Shainman, Gabi Ngcobo and John Peffer.

A wonderful evening.

Sunday March 13

Sunday. Dipping intio the auction world for the first time in many years, on Monday of this week I found myself in the ballroom of the Vineyard Hotel, consulting my Strauss & Co. catalogue.

I wanted to observe firsthand the collecting mania that has driven the steady flow of Irma Sterns to achieve ever higher prices at auction, breaking record after record.

But this was not going to be a night of electricity, gasps and vigorously clapped applause. The richly pigmented still lifes of vases of flowers reached the lower ends of the estimates, about R10 million on average, but the bidding around the catalogue cover image The Lemon Pickers (R10 – R14 million) seemed strangely desultory, and the hammer went down at R9.5m – a sale which might still be under negotiation. On www.straussart.co.za, there’s a blank opposite the lot number (236),



The Lemon Pickers is a gorgeous painting of sinuous half clad women (well, it must have been very hot!) balletically gathering lemons (more breast forms) in a Gauguin style setting. (Gauguin made a somewhat stiff painting with the same name) So why would this sensual painting be left on the sale room floor when the pretty but conventional flower paintings all found new homes?
Are South African collectors too conservative for a little flesh?

Price wise and subject wise, It will be interesting to see what happens when another wave of Irma Sterns, including some of her best works, come under the hammer on March 23. This time, at Bonhams in London

Tuesday, February 22

‘The best moment in making a film’ said an actor, intercepted on his way up the red carpet to the 2011 BAFTA award show, ‘is the two weeks before filming actually starts. One believes then that it’s all going to be brilliant. Two days after the start of filming, you’ve already made some mistakes, and you know that it isn’t.”

The parallel is not quite the same, but for me, the best part of an exhibition is the hours before the opening, when the work is at last all up on the freshly painted walls, straight, lit to its best advantage, and one is able to see for the first time how each piece works with the next. And also, whether each piece is strong enough to stand up for itself, as well as being part of a larger body of work.

In the empty gallery, no critic has yet weighed in with comments pointing out flaws, and one has not had to wonder if the compliments of friends are sincere or just well meaning and tactful.

Last Saturday, my show ‘Voices’ opened at the Goodman Cape, to my mind, the most beautiful commercial gallery space in the country. This Saturday, the 26th, I will be giving a walkabout at 11 a.m.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

It’s not often one can buy an artwork for R5.20. And get all the news about what is happening in Cairo at the same time.

On Wednesday, I received an email from Christian Nerf which read ‘Howzit Sue. I placed an ad in the Argus death announcements (today and tomorrow)... Thought you may want to acquire one’. In that sentence, ‘acquire’ is the key word.

An image of the ad was attached … a composite photo of the artistic duo Christian Nerf (balding, black rimmed glasses) and Doug Gimberg (deprecating closed eye smile, copious fiery locks).

21/04/1977 – 24/01/2011 Our friend, you have fallen silent in the prime of your life ……. ni dieu ni maitre.

The death announcement

So on Thursday I did buy The Argus and there on the front page of the Classified was Nerf Gimberg, pinkly smiling up from an announcement placed between the death notices of Martine Ward and Brenda Okun (born Kasimov).

So does this mean the two have given up their collaborative work? Are we to take this seriously ? Or is it one of those announcements, like the one Barend de Wet made years ago when he said he had given up being an artist once he produced a son?

Thursday, January 27, 2011

A few weeks ago, I put out a call on this blog for a Freedom Charter T-shirt, circa 1986. MoMA New York had requested one as backup ephemera for an upcoming exhibition of South African prints. And now, thanks to Andrew Lamprecht, an FC T-shirt has turned up! Andrew discovered that ex-SA Museum director Patricia Davison had bought two T-shirts years ago – one for the museum, and an extra. Patricia has kindly agreed to donate the extra one to MoMA and as Andrew was about to depart for New York on an Ampersand residency, he is hand couriering it to curator Judy Hecker.

I usually try to let my birthday slip past without much fanfare … it comes too soon after the Christmas/New Year round of parties for me to really feel like celebrating … but this year, under direct questioning from friends, I had to admit it was coming up. And a small supper party at the Grand Beach and Café followed. The biggest present came from Candice Breitz and her partner Alex, who came into the restaurant bearing an outsized golden S. Looked great on the table, and now it’s on the wall of my apartment.

My actual birthday I spent working on monotypes at Warren Editions. Which didn’t go too badly. And for artists, making work that doesn’t go badly is the best present of all.

Sunday, January 9, 2011

Is it too late to wish everyone a very happy New Year? I have been so busy working for my solo show ‘VOICES’ which opens at the Goodman Cape on February 19, that the New Year slid by as a blip which interrupted studio days.

But the New Year is always a time to stop and look back and assess the year that has gone by. And plan for the year ahead.

Very exciting news came my way in December. I had an email from the Rockefeller Foundation telling me that I had been awarded a Creative Arts Fellowship at the Bellagio Center on the banks of Lake Como under a new programme started in 2009. Mona Hatoum was one of last year’s fellows. In August, I had had a notification that I was one of 24 nominees for a fellowship. Three would eventually be selected, and I was asked to submit 10 images of recent work, a cv and a proposal. To learn that I was one of the final three was amazing.

A room at Bellagio

The Bellagio Center is a beautiful villa, where conferences and residencies of many kinds take place. The fellowship provides an apartment and a studio, full board and a stipend. I am not sure yet which months I will go, but I know it will be a wonderful experience.