Tuesday, July 5, 2011

I have given up being a conceptual artist on my Bellagio residency. This beautiful little town clinging to the banks of Lake Como is too far removed from reality, a ferry ride to the nearest train station. Lake Como was once the highway of northern Italy, carrying traders, silk merchants, diplomats and scurrilous adventurers from one end of the lake to the other, but today the travelers are nearly all tourists, bent on buying a beautiful Missoni scarf before tucking into lunch at a waterfront café.

Yesterday I heard a loud English voice under my studio window, and opened the shutters to find a group of tourists gazing up at me.

So I climb up instead to the hill below the Villa, spreading a cloth to sit on, and setting out my watercolours. Ahead lies the difficult decision of wondering whether to attempt to paint the rapidly changing patterns of the ferry trails on the water, or whether to settle for the obligingly stationary olive and cypress trees.

The cicadas have struck up their summer song, the scent of wild thyme has been released as I settle myself, and I try to position my water jar so that not too many ants drown themselves today.

Later, I will lunch off the delicious saturnine peaches that have the shape of squashed doughnuts, and go swimming at the edge of the lake.

Thursday, June 30, 2011

I’m back in Bellagio, Italy after a week in New York for a colloquium organized by Judy Hecker, prints curator at MoMA around the ‘Impressions: Prints from South Africa’ show currently up on the second floor of the museum. Co organizers were the Clark Institute, with Natasha Becker, ex of Cape Town, taking a leading role

Judy Hecker gives a walkabout of ‘Impressions’

With the topic on the table the curating of contemporary African art, a number of interesting issues came up, including the ongoing debate about the pigeonholing of artists into national contexts. Alisa LeGamma of the Metropolitan Museum talked of the need to skew African artists out of the context of African art into more of a global context, and American artist Willie Cole responded by asking what museum departments would do when all the regional departments were blurred into one.

MoMA director Glenn Lowry suggested that perhaps the term ‘global’ is no longer really useful, and maybe what is needed is to uncouple ‘global’ from ‘modernism’ and ‘modernity’.

A post colloquium dinner at Il Gattopardo: Bradley McCallum, Riason Naidoo,

Natasha Becker and Alisa leGamma

In between sessions, it was great to wander round MoMA, but the really incredible museum experience this week, was the Alexander McQueen show at the Met, Every artist could learn from studying his complete mastery of technique, materials and concept, and the way in which he could turn a historical reference into something new and brilliant. It was simply astonishing.

An Alexander McQueen jacket

Sunday, June 12, 2011

It’s taken me a whole week to recover from the exhilarating but exhausting whirl of the Venice Biennale preview days, the three days before the doors open to the general public. The entire artworld, it seems, is there to see and be seen.

It’s ridiculous, really. Popular national pavilions attract long queues – one New York art writer reported lining up for three hours to get into the Japan pavilion – whereas if one were only content to come a few days later, after the June 4 opening, one would be able to walk right in.

The Goodman Gallery party for Sigalit Landau

But then of course, one would miss the parties, Every major gallery, every exhibition throws a party for its artists, friends and supporters, and to take the vaporetto from one to another on any of the preview nights is to see palazzo after palazzo lit up and resounding with music and laughter,

South Africa gets a pavilion

The new South African pavilion proved hard to find, located as it is across a canal from the far end of the Arsenale. A tip: just ask for the Press Office, and when you get there, go outside and look across the water, A boat will be there to take you to the other side.

Mary Sibande’s ... of Prosperity

The building itself is beautiful, an old square maritime tower. Inside, Lyndi Sales occupies the lower floor with her silvery hanging installation, Satellite Telescope, and upstairs, Mary Sibande presents two new Sophie figures, the sharp corners of the honeycombed skirt of … of Prosperity echoed in the demolished staircase behind her, Siemon Allen’s remarkable response to the architecture is to present a dramatic hanging of thousands of record labels, a ‘silent archive’ of sound from South Africa.

Siemon Allen’s Labels

*See News for a story on the Venice sale of Nicholas Hlobo’s

Tuesday, June 1, 2011

Outside Florians

Hurrying to meet Cape Town artist Andrew Putter outside Florians on the Piazza San Marco, I pass the pair without whom any Venice Biennale would be incomplete – the fairies, dressed as always in matching delicately pink outfits.

Andrew is on the prestigious ‘Personal Structures’ at the Palazzo Bembo, and has been checking his remarkable singing portrait installation – we will end up at the Palazzo Bembo party at the end of the night - but now it is time to see some ART.

Yesterday was the day before the previews begin, the best possible time to have a look at work before the art mob descends. We wander through the beautiful long spaces of the Arsenale with their crumbling brick columns and are stopped short by what is clearly Nicholas Hlobo’s work.

Nicholas Hlobo’s Iimpundulu Zonke Ziyandilandela in the Arsenale at Venice

A fantastical creature is suspended from the ceiling of the Arsenale, Iimpundulu Zonke Ziyandiilandela, the rainbird that occurs in myths around the world. Nicholas’ trademark materials, black rubber, ribbons, printed cloth, found objects have here been fabricated into a menacingly powerful, hovering, sexually ambiguous presence with extraordinary detail, For me, It’s his strongest work yet.

Nicholas Hlobo in Venice

Monday, May 30

I am typing this on the Eurostar flying through the countryside from Milan to Venice. I have started my residency in Bellagio, on Lake Como, and in between the hours of work, have been wandering around this small town, drawn by the ever changing light on the silver and black Lake Como, and the enormous charm of the ochre and red buildings which line the steep narrow cobbled streets.

Evening light on Lake Como

A visit to the graveyard reveals the genealogical history of the families of this town. Almost every gravestone has photographs, dating back to the earliest days of photography, austere sepia portraits in oval frames which gaze out into eternity. It’s also a history of photographic portraiture itself – family members who died in recent years appear in colour, set in modernistic glass frames.

The grave of the family Sala-Grossi

But now it’s on to Venice, and the mad four days as the entire art world descends upon this tiny island to look, to party, to gossip, and occasionally , one hopes to stand in awe, as the 54th Biennale, entitled ILLUMInations, opens to the world.

Entering Venice by train

Tomorrow night I will go to a cocktail party at the magnificent recently restored Ca’ Giustinian , hosted by chief curator Bice Curiger and director of the Biennale, Paolo Baratta to honour the artists, lenders and supporters of the Biennale.

Let the party begin.

Monday, May 23, 2011

Krakow, Poland. A city with an Old Town dominated by the monolithic Wawel Castle on the hill, dating from the 11th century and occupied by a succession of monarchs and emperors until the Nazis took possession in World War 11.

Krakow Old Town

On Friday, May 13, I flew into the city as an observer of the 2011 edition of Krakow PhotoMonth, and also to do a Krakow version of my ‘Other Voices Other Cities’ series. The theme of PhotoMonth, devised by the curatorial team of photographers Olly Chanarin and Adam Broomberg, was Alias, a theme which seemed particularly appropriate to this city with its layers of dubious history. We are staying in the old Jewish district, Kazimierz, now a hip part of the city, with numerous clubs and small restaurants.

Not an artwork, but tokens of love – padlocks on a city bridge

With Alias, the curators’ unique idea was to create a series of exhibitions by a hybrid team of writers and artists. First, a writer was asked to write a story. Next, an artist made a piece of work based on the protagonist of the story. Finally, another writer invented a name and an artist’s biography based on the story and the artwork.

This invented name was the one that appeared in the catalogue. The exhibition openings, then, are a series of investigations into who did what with whom, and what came out of that collaboration.

The opening of ‘Ivan P’’s exhibition

And of course, there is time for parties, catching up, and good Polish food.

Friday, May 13, 2011

Life has been totally crazy for the past two weeks between returning from New York and London and leaving for Poland and Italy.

I did get to see ArtThrob’s editorial assistant Natasha Norman’s masters show, up for one night at the Michaelis Gallery. Her large scale linocuts are printed with shifting veils of colour viewed through grids, which hover between classic engravings and early television screens. Images are sourced from the movie Apocalyse Now and have something of the same hallucinogenic quality.

Natasha Norman in front of her work.

I also couldn’t miss Paul Edmunds’ obssessive line drawings in graphite at the Stevenson gallery, and Penny Siopis’ brilliant video on the story of a nun who was attacked and killed in the Transkei, many years ago. Siopis writes scripts based on careful research and cuts and pastes found random home movie and other footage to create films which seem truer in spirit than a straight documentary could ever be.

But mainly I worked on the photoshoot we did in New York for my Other Voices Other Cities series. In the workshop to decide on a statement of what it means to New Yorkers to live where they do, the group came up with, I MEAN, WHERE ELSE ARE YOU GONNA GO? Such a perfect expression of New York attitude.

Detail from the Other Voices Other Cities: New York shoot

We shot on a late afternoon on the silvery roof of an East Village squat, with the Empire State building floating in the background. I’m really happy with it.