Saying goodbye

December 20,  2013

In December 1989, two months before Nelson Mandela was released, I took the redoubtable activist Helen Joseph out to visit him in his house at the Victor Verster Prison, in Paarl. It was the first visit she had been allowed since Mandela had been jailed, 27 years earlier. Resistance Art in South Africa had just been published, and as Helen climbed out of my ancient Combi, I asked her to take an inscribed copy in to Madiba, so he could see what the artists of the country had been up to through the worst years of apartheid.

A few months after his release, I was working in my old studio, the Graphic Workshop in Obz, when the phone rang to say that Madiba wanted to meet the people who had worked against the demolition of District Six, and we were to meet there in half an hour. I was on deadline with some stupid job, which had to be finished that afternoon, so I frustratedly declined, thinking there would be many other opportunities.

Of course, there never was. I was in the great man’s presence many times, from that extraordinary day that we all stood on the Grand Parade in Cape Town to greet him, to numerous other occasions, but I never met him face to face.

I could have been at the opening of the ‘Colours’ exhibition in Berlin, curated by Sabine Vogel, an occasion when Wayne Barker got Madiba to sign his painting, pushing the price into the stratosphere. But I wasn’t.

And ultimately, it didn’t matter, As Cape Town mourned and celebrated in the Cape Town Stadium last week, as we watched the streams of television programmes which recapped so many examples of his almost unearthly grace and humanity, his lesson to all of us was so clear.

If only we can remember it as we go forwards into 2014 and for the rest of our lives.

Visiting New York, and Artists and Auctions

Sunday November 17, 2013

RoseLee Goldberg in the NeueHouse

In New York, the 2013 edition of Performa is in full swing, with a packed programme of electrifying offerings which end on November 23. Johannesburg artist Nicholas Hlobo was scheduled to give a key performance, but was prevented by illness from taking part. Check the list of events that are happening at www.performa-arts.org. 

The current New Yorker refers to director RoseLee Goldberg ‘the art historian who founded the festival in 2005 and who wrote a key book on the genre in 1979’ as ‘performance art’s P.T. Barnum’. 

I had a working session with RoseLee in New York in October, on my way back from Saint Paul. We are planning a show in the city for late 2014, and sat down to talk in the NeueHouse, an amazing downtown space on East 25^th for the unattached (to an office space) to work.  (‘A place to tap the fuzziness between art and life’ wrote the Financial Times). The luxurious five floor high ceilinged industrial space has quiet corners with leather couches, busy areas with rows of computers, restaurant facilities,  sparkling water on tap, and a screening room amongst its numerous facilities. I just wanted to move in.

Three days later, I flew back to Cape Town and three days after that, left for Hong Kong, but more about that vibrant city another time.

 Jane Alexander ‘Untitled’ 

Right now I want to talk about the sale of Jane Alexander’s ‘Untitled’ at the Strauss Art auction on Monday night in Johannesburg. Everyone in the local art world now knows that this powerful figurative sculpture fetched an astounding R5.5 million, a South African auction record, and was sold to a private collector. 

It came on to the market for the first time since it was initially sold for R800 on Alexander’s first solo show at The Market Galleries in Johannesburg in 1986.  The price achieved on Monday night was a just recognition of Alexander’s brilliance, and of the importance of her early work.

Comments on Facebook this week have implied that a system that allows a work to be sold at a price in such enormous excess of its original cost without benefitting the artist in any monetary way is unfair to the artist. 

If so, the fault is not with the auction system or the auction houses, but with the laws of the land.  

Some countries do enforce the payment of a percentage of a resale of an artwork to the artist. The Artists Resale Right (ARR) has been in operation in the European Union since June 2006. The regulations entitle living artists (and the heirs of dead artists up to 70 years after their death) to receive a royalty each time their work is resold by an auction house, gallery or art dealer. Work must sell through a professional art establishment for a minimum amount set in each country (in Ireland, it’s least 3000 euros less in some other countries). Australia and the Phllipines have similar arrangements.

Under the European Union system, Alexander would have received R27,500 – 0.5% of the sale, to be debited to the seller.

In North America, California had a system of resale rights for 35 years until it was declared unconstitutional in 2012.  In Canada, two members of parliament are currently proposing such a system.

If South African artists want Artist’s Resale Rights, we need to propose a new law. At the same time, proposing a tax deduction for buyers of artwork, and a 1% allocation to art for all new buildings would also be great ideas.

Monday, November 11, 2013

An archival sports photo hanging in my bedroom

at Alumni House, Macalester College

Last month, I was invited to Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota by Joanna Inglot, Professor of Art and Art History, to give a presentation on the way in which artists in South Africa responded to the AIDS pandemic in the early 2000s.  In my five days at Macalester, I also worked with photography lecturer Eric Carroll and the current first year students. Some weeks ahead of time I’d sent along a project outline for them to work on. 

Art historian Joanna Inglot and painter Chris Willcox

The project was for the students to meet the staff of the Minnesota Aids Project, and through them, make contact with people in the area living with HIV, asking if they might document their lives through photographs and recorded interviews.  The students did a great job, and nearly all of the interviewees came to the presentation of the work. 

Saint Paul is, of course, one of the Twin Cities along with Minneapolis, and in mid October, it’s quite beautiful: calm, crisp and bright, with the brilliant red and yellow fall foliage of the trees reflected in the Mississippi River which divides the two cities.

One afternoon, I took time off to visit the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, escorted by young art historian, Chloe Nelson. The main show was ‘Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties’ – more than 300 works by one of the seminal pop artists. 

Claes Oldenburg’s Spoonbridge in the garden of the Walker Art Center

The great thing about retrospectives is that alongside the classic works one recognizes immediately, like the wonderfully saggy and udder-like Three Way Plug, one sees work one really doesn’t know at all.  Oldenburg’s early Street Head/Gong, reminded me a bit of Moshekwa Langa’s Skins in its use of found paper (Oldenburg used newspaper, Moshekwa used cement sacks) treated with ordinary hardware products to stiffen the paper up and give it an organic sheen.

I was really glad I had the chance to go to Macalester.

 Oldenburg’s Three Way Plug

Oldenburg’s Street Head 1

Wednesday 16 October 2013

It appears I have taken a sabbatical from writing the diary – the last entry was made mid August. That was before I went to Bern, Switzerland in the last week of August, where I spent an amazing 10 days with 12 young artists from all over the world at the Paul Klee Museum Sommerakademie.

The Sommerakademie is an annual event, and this year, I was honoured to be chosen as guest curator, meaning, that I was able to invite other artists and curators to join in the intense discussions around questions of what the role of art is or isn’t in the contemporary world, and all the artists showed what work they were doing right now, and talked about issues like what everyone thought of the latest Ai Wei Wei video Dumbass, and after the official tour of the ancient city of Bern, we had a second alternative tour, looking into the alternative side of the city, with its well hidden problems of drug abuse and immigration.

Then there was swimming in the river Aare, a great afternoon discussion with Okwui Enwezor, a workshop with Candice Breitz which sent everyone out on to the streets of Bern conducting polls to uncover different aspects of the city, a film viewing with Penny Siopis, some interactions with cows and bells in the Jura Mountains, and lots of good food. For me, the best part was that although there was a closeness in the group right from the start, and a shared commitment to making art which reflects ruptures in the fabric of society, at the same time, points of view were quite divergent and strongly expressed.

It was a really remarkable experience.

August 15, 2013

The rare touch of colour in the dual exhibitions of Simon Gush and Jo Ractliffe (above) at the Stevenson Cape Town is the red glass bauble caught between the halves of a   table top – a metaphor for dissension over a staff Christmas party.  The piece is called Christmas Table, and it is one of Simon Gush’s meditations on the way that our position in the hierarchy of employment determines not only our working days but shapes our attitudes towards life, and towards what we think life owes us. 

Simon Gush Christmas Table

Jo Ractliffe’s  ‘Borderlands’ is an arid series of black and white photographs recording subtle traces on three areas of this country of the aftermath of the border wars of the apartheid years.  It is easy to sweep one’s glance over the whole room full of photos and think the bleakly beautiful images are rather similar, and not terribly dramatic. But that is the point. The lack of military detail, the desultory remains of old latrines, maybe, belie the awful truth of those times. Someone who had been through the experience of that war told Jo that for him, the photos ‘screamed’.

Luiza Cachalia

On the lighter side, young painter Luiza Cachalia tries her hand at catching the nervous energy of female stars of the melodramatic variety in her first solo exhibition at SMAC.  It’s called ‘Don’t Jump Off Bridge’

There’s something I must tell you (installation view)

My own exhibition, ‘All Our Mothers’ opens on August15 at the Goodman at 6 p.m, with a public walkabout on Saturday 17 at 11 a.m.  There’s something I must tell you is a multi screened video installation about the generational gap between the grandmothers of the Mandela generation, and their granddaughters. 

Everyone is welcome. To all the exhibitions, of course. Not just mine.

July 21, 2013

This week was Nelson Mandela’s 95^th birthday, and the nation and the world celebrated. It was heartwarming to learn from the press that his grandchildren said he was sitting up in his hospital bed and smiling.

I thought back to 25 years ago, 1988, Madiba’s 70^th birthday.  He had been in jail for more than 20 years then, and whether he would ever be freed was still a matter of speculation.

In early July that year, Cape Town’s South newspaper, a weekly anti-apartheid tabloid, asked me to design a poster to honour Mandela’s birthday. It was against the law to publish a photograph of a prisoner, but I used a photocopy of one of the old Treason Trial era photos of Mandela,  and made a screenprinted frame in the style of the A Few South Africans series of women portraits.

That Friday, I couldn’t wait to get a copy of South and see the Mandela poster as the centre page spread. An announcement on the front page of South promised the poster within, but when I opened up the paper, the centre pages were a total blank. I couldn’t believe it.

I phoned the editor. It turned out that South was actually printed on The Argus presses each week. The South people knew that it was against the law to publish a picture of Mandela, so they tried that week to get The Argus  to print late at night, hoping no-one on their staff would notice the offending photo. But The Argus did notice, and refused. 

South decided to leave the centre pages blank as a protest. In any case, it was too late to substitute anything else.

I would have liked to have posted a picture of the never published poster on the blog today, a 25 year old tribute, but I hunted through my studio for several hours and I can’t find it. 

Sunday, June 30, 2013

At the recent Volta Art Fair, visitors taking the pink carpeted walkway into the interior could not escape reading this message: MY OTHER RIDE IS YOUR MOM.  Ed Young was at it again.  Volta runs concurrently to Art Basel, and focuses on up and coming artists and galleries, and inside the exhibition spaces, Young offered another profound sentiment: FUCK THE POOR.  A stuffed white bunny wore a MAC-lipsticked smile, and bumper stickers were available. For those who feared that the Volta loos might run out of toilet paper, a roll printed with an allover design of ED YOUNG hung on the wall as an emergency supply. Young did not himself go to Volta, but the SMAC Gallery reported back that some viewers loved the work and others hated it.

   

Talking of art fairs, Cape Town is getting its own, with the emphasis on ‘affordable’ art i.e. no work for sale will be priced over R50 000. The new venture is under the auspices of Fiera Milano Exhibitions Africa, organisers of the Good Food & Wine show, and the project manager is Kamey Butler. Dates are October 25 to 27 2013, and the venue is the Lookout Centre at the V&A Waterfront. The title of the new art fair, ‘Art For Me’, seems to pander a little too obviously to the aspirations of those who take the word ‘lifestyle’ seriously, but hey, there are many entries into the field of contemporary art. 

Bumped into AfrikaBurns organizer Robert Weinek this week. AfrikaBurns is, of course, the South African version of America’s legendary annual Burning Man event, with its extravagant creativity, its burning sculptures and a culture of free exchange. Since its inception in 2007, AfrikaBurns, held in the Tankwa Karoo, has developed its own set of legends, and camp followers, a devoted tribe which sees the limited tickets for the event sold out months in advance. Robert tells me that this year, a group of 40 AfrikaBurns-ites plus a sculpture of a full sized dinosaur have been invited to Burning Man. The South African sculptures go one step further than those seen at up to now at Burning Man – they are kinetic, so they not only burn they move!  

Raised eyebrow department

‘While it may seem like quite an imposing building with its stark white façade, towering Greek pillars and massive doors opening out onto the Company’s Gardens – the interior of the Iziko South African National Gallery is as warm and familiar as a Xhosa mud hut’ – extract from’ i on iziko’ newsletter received by email this week.