Before the doors opened

Visitors to Penny Siopis’ retrospective ‘Time and Again’ at the National Gallery in Cape Town enter the Lieberman Room to be confronted by a majestic installation  filling the rectangular space between two grey columns, the floor and the ceiling.  It looks as if it has been there forever; an extraordinary accumulation of curiosities which have slowly settled into place over time. 

The installation is called Charmed Lives, and the objects have all had a previous existence in the artist’s own life and art. The first installation was constructed in the Museum for African Art in downtown Soho, New York in 1999, for a show called ‘Liberated Voices’ (in the days when there were still museums and galleries in Soho, and not just luxe brand name stores). More followed.

For the retrospective, all the stored objects were brought out and laid on the floor at the gallery, a sea of personal and previously owned possessions. Balancing colours and textures to relate to paintings already hung in the room, and working with a team of assistants to steady the ladder and hand up objects, Penny decided on the position of each on the wooden grid built to support them.

The list includes: a plastic sheep’s head mask, cascades of dolls dressed, or partially dressed in a variety of costumes, or naked, or dismembered, a silvery silicone spiders web, an ancient gas mask, a blue kitchen colander, an animal which might be a cat, or perhaps a beaver (there is a suggestion of a flattened tail) with scratchy brown ‘fur’, beadwork, lots of it, diaphanous white fabrics trimmed with lace, dirty khaki military mesh, a little leather sling which might once have held a water bottle for a soldier in the bush, baskets, bells and an  upside down Bambi, a red board with moulded examples of grenades and limpet mines which in the apartheid years would have hung in a post office in South Africa to warn citizens to be ever on the alert for such dangers, glittering jewellery, silver trays and mugs, two round plaster plaques with white seagulls against a bright blue background, crystal pendants from a chandelier, a decorated plastic helmet once worn by a BUCS football team supporter, and more soft toys than a child could play with in a month.

Each artefact was attached to a wooden grid with cable ties by the artist, who at times stretched perilously from the top of the ladder, jamming one foot against the installation as she reached upwards to fix yet another piece into the assemblage. And like the back of a tapestry in a mediaeval museum, the colours on the front of the installation are reproduced on the reverse with woollen threads which hang down, blurring the sharp definition of the front of the installation into a soft curtain of gentle tones.

The subject of blue

If I am seriously addicted to anything, it is the weekly arrival of my New Yorker magazine, which I read almost cover to cover, leaving out (usually) the articles on obscure American politicians or on the failing fortunes of one or other sporting teams. The quality of New Yorker writing is such that practically everything else – restaurant, film and book reviews, fiction, in depth articles about all manner of subjects - gives enormous reading pleasure.

The strength of this addiction became apparent to me during the recent Johannesburg postal strike, which left my letter box infuriatingly empty of the desired object month after month.

This week, the October 6 issue arrived, several weeks late, but a harbinger of the end of the drought. I hope. I was rewarded by a remarkable article by Calvin Tomkins about the painter Chris Ofili, in the Profiles section, an article which tracks the Turner prize-winner from birth through his early career and the residency in Zimbabwe where he started to consider the artistic possibilities of introducing elephant dung into his brilliant collage paintings, through his ascendancy in London to his current studio in an old cottage in Trinidad.

Here is Tomkins writing about Ofili and the subject of blue: ‘On his many visits to the island, he had been fascinated by its haunted landscape and mysterious light – especially the slow transition from day into night, an extended period when forms are still visible, but their shapes become indistinct. Trying to capture that experience in paint opened up a whole new way of working. “I felt I was tapping into a process of looking that was slower,” he said.'

‘Alone in the white cottage in Trinidad, he began experimenting with blue, a color he had always shied away from, because of its tendency to dominate other colors… ”I had found that if you put silver underneath blue, the blue sits back, like night, or glows like moonlight,” he told me.'

Art making porn.

Frieze P.S.: Here are two links I meant to include in my last column. The first is to a Frieze review of Lisa Brice’s French Riviera show: http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/lisa-brice/. The second is to a column by Polly Brock on my work at Frieze Masters http://www.artctualite.com/?p=3138

A Week at Frieze Masters

Glimmering whitely across the green lawn of Regents Park, a cathedral-like tent has been erected to house Frieze Masters for Frieze week, London’s frenzied annual October art fest. 

Day One is setup day. Crates from galleries around the world are being unpacked. Exhibitors have been given sheets of A4 paper printed with the word RUBBISH as part of their welcome pack. Just so art doesn’t get carted away by the cleaners by mistake.

New galleries are taking advantage of the week to stage opening events. One of these is Rodeo, in Charing Cross Road. I didn’t really take in much about the exhibitions but the vodka and pizza kept coming and soon the street outside the gallery was stacked with empty boxes.

Back inside the Frieze Masters tent, by Day Three, the work has been vetted by the committee – rules about the dates the work was made are strict. It must all have been made before the end of the previous century, or must be taken down.

This is the Goodman Gallery stand, with my work. Each space has its own muslin ceiling, and feels more like a small gallery in a museum than an art fair space.

Visitors stream through all day. Swiss curators Jacqueline Burckhardt and Bice Curiger stop by.

One of the most popular stands is Helly Nahmud  with an installation entitled The Collector.  It’s the imagined apartment of  a dedicated  Parisian collector circa 1968, complete with Picassos, Miros, objet’s d’art, mid century furniture, stacks of magazines, catalogues and all manner of genteel clutter. Music from that era wafts through.

Or you can buy Rembrandt’s extraordinary 1698 Portrait of Man with Arms Akimbo. A Rembrandt on an art fair! It would have been mildly interesting to know  the asking price, but the gallery would not have divulged this to the casual questioner. 

If you are in a position to acquire a masterpiece, you could also choose a handsome Rubens to add to your collection. Or a Bonnard, a classic honey coloured painting of a woman next to a bath. There are also top notch offerings by modern masters like Warhol, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Helen Frankenthaler.  These works will not be seen in museums, but will pass from one private collection through the medium of a gallery at Frieze Masters into another private collection.

I feel immensely privileged to view them while they are briefly in the public domain.

Cape Town artist Lisa Brice lives in London now, and has an exhibition on at a hot new gallery called French Riviera in Bethnal Green Road. She also has a new work on the Goodman stand at Frieze. In this picture, we have just finished a very nice lunch at the excellent Frieze Masters restaurant, Locanda Locatelli, conveniently located very close to the Goodman stand.

This is a detail from Lisa’s exhibition poster.  ‘Cut your Cloth’ is a complex layering of the history of painting and the representation of women within that history. 

Over at the V and A Museum, concern about the representation of women artists in museums is manifested in a recreation of a classic performance by New York’s Guerilla Girls. It’s part of an engaging show called  ‘Objects of Disobedience’.

After five frantic days, Frieze Contemporary is over. This photo is taken in the final hour of the final day.

The Goodman stand at Frieze Contemporary.  In the front of the space is a a steel construction by Mounir Fatmi, and on the wall, a stripey painting by Moshekwa Langa.  

The Frieze after party is held on the rooftop of the Ace Hotel.  French Riviera co-owner Jennifer Lewandowski and video curator Barbara London, now retired from MoMA, stand with their backs to the stunning view. 

DAC Venice fiasco. Again.

On the 15^th September 2014 Ms Refilwe Zulu of the Department of Arts and Culture signed a covering letter calling for curatorial bids for the South African pavilion at the next Venice Biennale, to be held from May 9 to November 22 2015. Here’s the link: 

https://www.dac.gov.za/sites/default/files/Covering%20letter.pdf

The closing date for bids is 11 a.m. on Monday, October 13, 2014. 

The information that the DAC is calling for tenders appeared on the VANSA site on September 29, which is where I picked it up for the first time today. The DAC will give no briefing.

So there is now a bare two weeks left for curators to put together a bid for this major international event, even though the Department of Arts and Culture has committed to a long term rental of the space and has been fully aware that the next Biennale has been coming up for the past two years.

This is a total disgrace, and once more, an insult to the art community. 

Here is a short extract from the document laying out the requirements:

‘The appointed service provider will be responsible for the following: 

Creative/Curatorial

• Concept and planning of the exhibition
• Design of exhibition space
• Theme of the exhibition
• Commissioning of new art works
• Selection of artists
• Content of catalogue

Logistics

• Design and construction of exhibition
• Transport and Insurance
• Mounting and dismantling
• Venue security

• Liaison with Commissioner
• Liaison with Biennale organizers
• Mounting and dismantling of exhibition

Marketing and PR

• Marketing & PR material including catalogue printing, written material and social media
• Catalogue design
• Press material
• Press releases and interviews
• Profiling of exhibition

Management

• Management of artists and contractual arrangements
• Reporting and monitoring 
• Day to day liaison with service providers in both countries
• Contingency plan’

Detailed financial plans are also required. Also to be completed in two weeks! We as the art community need to stand up and let the DAC know exactly what we think. 

Why on earth didn’t this document go out at the beginning of this year with a three month deadline to allow for critical consideration and the proper drawing up of plans?

Clearly, the DAC took absolutely no notice of the fury they engendered in 2012 when they followed the same path with a last minute call for a curator. They simply don’t care.

Send us your comments and we will pass them on to the DAC

Highlights of the last month

September 18, 2014

I love the cartoon above from a recent New Yorker. It so beautifully skewers the pretension inherent in the way some artists (and critics) write about their work. And I specially love the way this dog is stretching his little paws to emphasize the difficult physicality of his practice.

Talking about the difficult physicality of practice – one of the most brilliant performances I have ever seen was Un-Mute on the opening night of the recent Live Art Festival in Cape Town.  This was the second manifestation of GIPCA’s Live Art Festival, ten days of performance art, and like the first, was directed by the indefatigable Jay Pather.

Andile Vellem is a choreographer and dancer who is deaf, and communicates to his fellow dancers by signing. in Un-Mute he worked with Themba Mbuli and two dancers whose disability requires they move around in wheelchairs: Nadine Mckenzie and Zama Sonjica. The interaction between the performers and the wheelchairs was a masterpiece of drama and fierce timing. 

The wheelchairs themselves were driven with such skill by Mackenzie and Sonjica, that they seemed alive, wheeling, spinning, charging across the stage as their owners were lifted or flung out of the chairs by the other two dancers. One might imagine that owning a pair of functioning legs was an essential for a dancer. Not in this case.

Over at the Goodman, in his exhibition, ‘Show and Tell’, Mikhael Subotzky was also concerned with the limitations of the senses and how that limitation might be transcended As a photographer, Subotzky’s interest is in our sense of vision, and in the difference between the images which imprint themselves on the retina and how we actually perceive them – a perception governed not only by reality but by the conditioning of a whole slew of social factors.

Most of us remember those once popular stereograms that at first appeared to be an impenetrable overall pattern, but if you squinted slightly and stared hard, the pattern would miraculously reassemble itself into a flat background and a foreground object. In the largest work on his show, Sibidia Autosterogram, Subotzky  produces a wall sized version of this, projecting a jiggling pattern of brilliantly coloured pixels whose rapid movements make it even more difficult to penetrate the flat surface to the action behind.

It may seem quite a leap to go from Subotzky’s esoteric experimentations to Michael Taylor’s playful figurative paintings on his Whatiftheworld show, ‘I was born yesterday,’ but there is something about the way Taylor abstracts his foregrounds so that the main part of the image is pretty much all on the same plane – a seemingly spontaneous but very skilful handling of pattern and space - which somehow reminds me of Subotzky’s Sibidia Autostereogram.

And to sign off this monthly round up, a couple of pictures of South African artists taking part in the annual Paul Klee Zentrum Sommerakademie in Bern. One of last year’s fellows, Lerato Shadi, flew in from Berlin, and is seen here with London dancer Andrew Kerton.

And here, outside the historic Bern Kunsthalle is this year’s fellow Igshaan Adams, with Kaya Bekhalam and Federica Bueti.

Women’s Day in Cape Town

For non-South Africans, August 9, Women’s Day, is the anniversary of the 1956 march of 20 000 women on Pretoria to demand that women not be forced to carry passbooks.

This year, there was another march, on a different issue, marked by the high number of children taking part, whether they were carried, pushed in strollers, shoulder ridden or allowed to stride out decisively on their own.  About 50 000 people marched from District Six and swept up Adderley Street to Parliament to demand that Israel stop bombing Gaza and that the South African government should take action against Israel.  Inevitably, the presence of the children led to a sad reflection on the slain children of Gaza. 

The FREE PALESTINE march sweeps past The Slave Lodge

As I came out of the Slave Lodge, where I had been giving a walkabout of my show, ‘There’s something I must tell you’, the first marchers reached the corner, and an hour later, they were still swarming past. STOP BOMBING CHILDREN read one sign, and APARTHEID ISREAL. Artist Lynn Lomovsky went by carrying a sign reading BEING JEWISH DOESN’T MAKE ME A ZIONIST. Our national treasure Archbishop Tutu had given a speech at the beginning of the march, saying how important it was, in spite of everything, not to hate.

 One of Sumaya Hisham’s photographs of Archbishop Tutu 

Earlier in the week, Tutu was present at the opening of an exhibition of vivid photographs of him going about his daily life, taken by photo journalist Sumaya Hisham, photographs which exude his warmth, his wisdom and his charisma. 

Sumaya Hisham 

Sumaya says sometimes the Archbishop made her laugh so much she couldn’t take the photo she wanted, but the images that are there are a fine record of this remarkable man. The exhibition is set up in St George’s Cathedral, and it’s up for the whole of August.

Showing Mr Redford my etchings

And on a personal note, two weeks ago, the Slave Lodge called me to ask if I would be free on August 1 to give a tour of my show at the request of an important visitor… a visitor who turned out to be actor, environmental activist  and Sundance director Robert Redford and his party. A most unexpected honour.

There's Something I Must Tell You

Cape Town’s Iziko Slave Lodge

Until February this year, I had not set foot in the Iziko Slave Lodge at the top of Cape Town’s Adderley Street since it changed its name from the Cultural History Museum a few years ago. Then director Lalou Meltzer invited me to show my video installation work, There’s something I must tell you in the Slave Lodge in June.

The Slave Lodge is the second oldest colonial building in South Africa, and once housed the slaves the Dutch settlers brought in to work in the V.O.C, vegetable gardens. Van Riebeeck shot his first hippo in the swamp where Church Square, diagonally opposite the museum, now stands.

What I remembered best from an earlier visit to the museum years ago was a reconstruction of a Victorian chemist’s shop in one corner of an upper gallery. And some old china.

Well, the chemist’s shop is still there. But the Slave Lodge changed its curatorial policy as well as its name, so that today the contemporary sits alongside the historical artefacts and the videos telling of the importation of the slaves.

Siemon Allen’s ‘Labels’ at the Slave Lodge

Amongst the contemporary art exhibitions are Siemon Allen’s ‘Labels’: scans of thousands of record labels documenting the history of South African music hanging in curving curtains upstairs. And Keith Dietrich’s ‘Fragile Histories’, portraits of local people with immaculately folded text laden tracing paper rosettes can be found in another gallery. 

On the ground floor. my exhibition of work on women in the struggle over a period of thirty years, ‘There’s something I must tell you’, occupies five galleries.

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

The concept is for visitors to view the rooms of portraits of women, etched, photographed and videoed, and perhaps to reflect again on the histories of their own families. 

The room for writing.

In one room there are painted ‘pages’ on the walls, blank or lined, with the invitation, ‘remembering our grandmothers’.  Stairs and a hanging pen provide access. People started writing from the first moments of the opening.