Friday, April 22, 2011

I arrive in London the day before the South African photographic show, ‘Figures and Fictions’, opens at the Victoria & Albert Museum. The show has had terrific pre publicity, with an eight page spread in the London Sunday Times. On Monday April 11, Lisa Brice and I head for the opening. Some of the artists are here – Terry Kurgan, Lolo Veleko and Pieter Hugo – and it is good to catch up with locals art historian Annie Coombes and artist Joy Gregory. ArtThrob’s international editor Amy Halliday is there, and so, of course, is curator Tamar Garb. The show has great energy.

Zwelethu Mthethwa’s Untitled from The Brave Ones series at the V&A

Across town, dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has filled the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern with more than 100,000,000 porcelain sunflower seeds, each handformed and painted by 1600 porcelain workers in the town of Jingdizhen over a two year period.

Ai Weiwei with Sunflower Seeds at the Tate Modern

Simply called ‘Sunflower Seeds’ the piece has many layers of meaning, During Mao’s cultural revolution, sunflower seeds were often the only food available, so they are both a symbol of repression, and of a small way of sharing in those austere times.

On April 3, Ai Weiwei was arrested at the airport as he attempted to leave mainland China for Hong Kong. An international outcry has followed. The Chinese authorities refuse to release him and have said he was arrested for tax evasion.

Earlier this week, I signed a petition calling for his release. Today Good Friday, comes the news that the change.org site is under cyber attack from within China, evidence that the petition is working. Here is the link. Please sign, http://www.change.org/petitions/call-for-the-release-of-ai-weiwei

Sunday, April 17, 2011

My last Thursday in New York is even busier than usual, trying to catch up with as many people as I can before heading for JFK.

Breakfast is at Le Pain Quotidien on Broadway at 91st with artist friend Michael Waugh whose exhibition at Romero Schroeder & Shredder I visited last week. His installation, The Accumulation of Capital, takes on the task of turning this economic concept into art. Over a period of six months, Waugh filmed himself packing up the varied and eclectic contents of nine generations of his family’s china and glassware cabinets now spread out on the floor of the gallery. The video voiceover discusses theories of capitalist accumulation.

More at www.michaelwaugh.com.

Michael Waugh’s The Accumulation of Capital.

Lunch is with Linda Marston-Reid at the elegant Maya Lin designed headquarters of the Rockfeller Foundation, floating above the city. Linda is the coordinator of the Bellagio Center in Italy, and the purpose of the lunch is to discuss my upcoming residency at Bellagio, due to start in May.

At 4 p.m. I have a date with acclaimed film maker Susan Vogel who is waiting for me next to an Urs Fischer sculpture of a yellow teddy bear merged with a desk lamp, made by the artist with the aid of a 3D laser scanner. Teddy has been installed that very day outside the classic Seagram Building on Park Avenue, prior to a September auction date.

Susan Vogel and the Urs Fischer teddy bear

Susan has just completed a remarkable film on the artist El Anatsui, Fold Crumple Crush, a tribute to the Ghanaian artist whose intricate wall hangings fashioned from discarded bottle tops have made this late career artist an international art star. View the trailer online at vimeo.com/16874224

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?