2013 in Review

JANUARY

 Opening night visitors chat between two constructions by Serge Alain Nitegeka at the Stevenson Cape Town.

In a new video, an animated William Kentridge is pursued through the pages of a book by a calligraphic version of himself. At the Goodman Cape.

Lisa Brice and I go to supper at Sean O’Toole’s and I am impressed by the simplicity of the bookcase Sean has had made for himself.

FEBRUARY

Philip Miller watches francolins jockeying for position at the water bowl at Churchhaven

I go to Switzerland to make plans for the Paul Klee Museum Sommerakademie. I forget my CANON G10, so I have to photograph the snowy landscape through the window on my old Nokia.

Moshekwa Langa opens at the Goodman Cape. It’s great to see him again, and the work is great too.

MARCH

This is the month that I work with the Monkey Films crew to document the conversations between grandmothers and granddaughters in Soweto. Here, I capture Mpume and the 101-year-old Rebecca Kotane between takes.

The memorial service in the Wits Great Hall for the much beloved Amina Cachalia is extremely moving. The grandchildren each recount personal memories. Above, Coco and Luiza Cachalia.

Candice Breitz brings ‘The Woods’ to the Johannesburg Goodman – work reflecting on child actors in the film industries of Hollywood, Bollywood and Nollywood. Here, a moment from The Audition.

APRIL

Artist Robin Rhode and ArtThrob staffer Chad Rossouw at the opening of Robin’s show at the Stevenson in Cape Town.

The giant crayons Robin had fabricated for children to add to his black wall drawings.

 I have tea with dancer extraordinaire Nelisiwe Xaba to discuss her performance workshop at the Sommerakademie in August.

MAY

My show ‘All Our Mothers’ opens at the Goodman Johannesburg. It is a six screen video installation. There are last minute technical problems but they get solved. Most of the participants are able to come to the opening. I am floating with relief.

Two weeks after ‘All Our Mothers’ opens, I head for Venice, and the Biennale. Our hotel is the one with the green canopy. It’s an old monastery.

In the relatively quiet days before the VIP previews at the Biennale, Brenton Maart stands in front of Joanne Bloch’s work in the South African pavilion.

JUNE

The most interesting thing about this pedestrian rendering of the figure of a pregnant thalidomide victim is that artist Marc Quinn actually managed to make his inflatable look like marble. From a distance.

One of the hot tickets at the Biennale was the Prada Foundation’s recreation of the iconic Harald Szeeman show of 1969: ‘When Attitudes become Form’.

We’re all smiling because we’ve managed to get to the head of the two hour queue by spotting a friend right up front.

JULY

It’s school holidays. My family explores the cave at Arniston, on the Southern Cape coast.

Jo Ractliffe’s exhibition ‘The Borderlands’, exploring the aftermath of war on the communities involved, opens at the Stevenson.

A winter sunrise photographed from my balcony

AUGUST

In mid August, ‘All Our Mothers’ moves to the Goodman Cape Town.

A few days after the opening of ‘All Our Mothers’, I fly to Bern to take up the exciting position of guest curator of the 2013 Paul Klee Sommerakademie. The daily discussions of the twelve fellows are interrupted by an outing into the mountains.

In this blurry late night shot (by Jelena Martinovic) a famous curator displays a killing technique at the ping pong table.  

SEPTEMBER

Back in South Africa, a weekend at Churchhaven produces an unexpected event: the birth of three little stripey mice in Penny Siopis’ bed.

In the Annexe of the National Gallery, ‘The Difference Loom’ explores the links between textile art and technology. In this detail from the Keiskamma Art Project’s Guernica, a woman holds the body of a person dying of AIDS.

At the Goodman, Clive van den Berg’s confidently assertive and sumptuously  textured painting, Underneath l, on his show ‘Land Throws Up a Ghost’ also reflects on the ravages of AIDS, worked in a very different way: the brilliant colouring belying the somber theme.  It’s a remarkable piece of art.

OCTOBER

Alumni House at Macalaster College, Saint Paul, Minneapolis, is my home for a week while I undertake a project with first year photography students.

The students’ task is to interview and take photographs of AIDS activists to make audio visual presentations for the Macalaster Global Health Colloquium.

On my way back from Minneapolis, I catch the new photographers show at the New York MoMA. Brendon Fowler crashes and smashes his framed images together to make sculptural objects. Quite interesting.

NOVEMBER

In Hong Kong, students from SCAD take me on a tour of the city to find the right location for the photoshoot for the Other Voices: Hong Kong project.

In a Hong Kong street market, SCAD staffers Carl Johnson and Van Chiu hold up samples of the coloured lights we will edge the letters with for the Voices project.

The Hong Kong students’ statement about the essential nature of life in Hong Kong is NO TIME TO STROLL.  We shoot the sequence at a busy downtown corner. The blue lighting spills onto the road.

Collector and magnate Jochen Zeitz announces the launch of the new Museum of Contemporary African Art at the V&A Waterfront

In Cape Town, new political party Agang leader, the highly esteemed Mamphela Ramphele, invites local artists to lunch to discuss a cultural agenda for Agang.

DECEMBER

The father of the nation dies, and across the country his death is mourned and his life is celebrated.

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.