Sunday, December 18, 2011

Last time I saw Okwui Enwezor was in Venice in June, at one of the Goodman Gallery Biennale bashes. It was great to meet up. Okwui was, of course, the director of the legendary 2nd Johannesburg Biennale in 1997, and is now the director of the Munich Haus des Kunst.
This week I heard news of him from two different sources: curator Rory Bester told me he was due in Johannesburg at the end of this past week, to make final choices for the show he will be curating some 18 months hence at the International Center for Photography in New York, The Rise and Fall of Apartheid.

And from an unrelated email from NYU student Allison Young, who was part of my Other Voices: New York shoot earlier this year (I MEAN, WHERE ELSE ARE YOU GONNA GO?) I learned that Okwui will go to New York in the new year as visiting professor to teach a course on contemporary African at NYU.

Allison Young, in a detail from the Voices New York shoot.

No curator has done more than Okwui to bring news of art from this continent to an international audience.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

As a child of 7, I stood at our living room window in Florida, just outside Johannesburg, and watched two curved dark tunnel shapes spiraling powerfully across the horizon. The tornado hit Roodepoort, five miles away, and next day I learned that four people had died. My father packed us into the Pontiac and drove us out to view the streets littered with crumpled corrugated iron roofs.

Today, in those parts of the US where tornados occur, tracking them has become a popular pastime with those who crave being drawn into the elemental. But experiencing being drawn into the force field of a tornado is now as possible as dammit at the Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town. On the exhibition ‘What we talk about when we talk about love’ the brilliant Mexican based Belgian artist Francis Alÿs is presenting Tornado.

Running with his camera directly into the swirling dark forms of the tornados in what seems an act of total madness, Alÿs, allows himself to be battered by flying debris and huge volumes of sound. One cannot but be awed by this unstoppable natural force.

The beam of light emanating from Penny Siopis

Last weekend at the lagoon at Churchaven, walking with Penny Siopis and Emma Bedford as the sun sank in the sky, we witnessed an intriguing natural phenomenon of a much quieter kind. Each of us could perceive a beam of light above the shadow of our own heads, but not of the other two. Interestingly, the beam could be seen even as we each photographed our own shadow.

Friday, November 25, 2011

No pictures today. I need all the space for writing. A few weeks ago, the diary featured David Goldblatt’s remarkable photograph of jubilant parliamentarians celebrating the signing of the new constitution in front of the House of Assembly. You can view it on David’s current show at the Goodman Cape.

At the opening of the show, David told me he had had only thirty minutes to shoot the picture, taken from a high window in a building opposite the parliamentary buildings. Communication with his subjects was by bullhorn. After each shot was taken, the parliamentarians cheered and waved ecstatically and had to be subdued via the bullhorn for the next shot.

On Wednesday this week came the news that David has declined to accept the State Order of Ikhamenga Silver, awarded to South Africans who have excelled in the arts, in sports or in journalism. The letter was sent to President Jacob Zuma following Black Tuesday, the day on which the Protection of State Information Bill was passed in Parliament.

Wrote David, ‘Firstly … this action severely undermines our brave but fragile democracy and the rule of law. Secondly, I decline the award in protest against what has been done to the spirit in which the award was created.’

The letter in full can be found elsewhere on the net.

To my knowledge, David’s action is the first sign from artists that State patronage is no longer acceptable when that State attempts to muffle debate and silence the press.

One thinks back to the time of the 1979 State of Art in South Africa conference, when artists signed a pledge not to participate in any State backed art exhibition (and that included invitations to international biennales, then channeled through the government) until art education was open to all races. Artists refused from then on to give legitimacy to the apartheid government.

Sadly, it seems that the need of opposition to the State has once again arrived. Each of us will have to consider again what it is we need to do as artists and as South Africans to make the State understand how crucial it is to preserve the democracy which was achieved at such terrible cost.

We cannot sit back and just hope for the best.

Sunday, November 20

At 7 a.m. on November 12, the sun is already high in the Johannesburg sky. The rooftop bar of the 12 Decades Hotel is deserted, and looking down from there, the red roofs of the Arts on Main complex lie dead ahead.

All the rooms in the hotel are decorated by artists or designers. It’s a really cool place to stay.

My room, decorated by Dokter and Misses

I am in Johannesburg for an intensive conference on public art organized by Stephen Hobbs and Marcus Neustetter of the Trinity Session. On the first day, there’s a packed programme of presentations of public art and architectural interventions from around the country. The Johannesburg Development Agency has a policy in place that allocates 1% for art on public building projects – would the rest of the country please take note.

On day two, conferees can choose between tours of public art in Soweto, or in the inner city parks. A difficult choice, but I am interested in taking a look at Hillbrow and the city centre in their current manifestations, and it’s good to see how heavily the parks are used on this Sunday morning.

Mpho Mpolokeng talks about his playground project, next to a sculpture by Marco Cianfanelli

By 6 p.m. we are back up on the roof. By now, it’s pumping.

Donna Kukama and Roger van Wyk at the rooftop bar.

Sunday, November 6, 2011

What does one do with a piece of art that you have finished, but don’t really like and you certainly don’t want to have shown?

Jane Alexander once told me that in the very early stages of her career, the Butcher Boys period of the 80s, she was so concerned that a reject sculpture might be found frightening by rubbish collectors if dumped in the bin that she cut the sculpture up and took the pieces to the municipal dump herself.

I once took some poorly printed etchings to the local charity shop in Observatory, thinking at least they could be sold anonymously and raise a few bucks for a good cause, only to have Peet Pienaar gleefully announce a few weeks later that he had found a cache of my work and bought it in. One print must have been signed after all. My heart sank as I imagined the titters as Peet showed them around.

This week, like a unwanted body resurfacing, a steel book piece I made 20 years ago and never liked and finally threw into the recycling bin several months ago was carried back into my studio by our cleaner. Even the recyclers didn’t want it, it seemed. But strangely, when I opened up the plastic wrapping for the first time in ten years and had another look, time had softened by poor opinion of the work, and I think with a few changes ….

And on the social side, the Stevenson Gallery hosted a highly convivial dinner at Anatoli for visiting artists Frohawk Two Feathers and Angela Ferreira, following the opening of their excellent show at the gallery.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Every day, at least 20 invitations to exhibition openings from here and from around the world arrive on the screen of my laptop, most of which I glance at and delete, noting one or two I would like to know more about, or visit.

Today there is one from the Goodman Gallery Cape announcing a new show of work by David Goldblatt. The invitation images shows a large group of people formally grouped for an official photograph in front of the Houses of Parliament.

The caption reads: Members of the Constitutional Assembly on the steps of the Senate House in the parliamentary precinct, shortly after they had unanimously adopted the Constitution of South Africa, Cape Town, 11 October 1996.

As a photographer who had unrelentingly recorded the harsh effects of apartheid through the years, from the demolitions to the grim faced Nationalist ministers in all their high handed arrogance, this photograph must have marked a significant career moment for Goldblatt, the recording of the people who had signed the country’s pledge to transform itself.

The mark of a great artist is one who works continuously for years, pushing through periods of self doubt in the attempt to share a personal vision with the world and thus building a sustained and authentic practice. Of no one is this truer than David Goldblatt. How much poorer would this country be without his photographs.

Tuesday, October 11

By the second week of the Istanbul Biennial, walking the streets every day, I was beginning to feel almost at home in this pulsating metropolis of 17 million people. Frances Goodman and I had steamed and been scrubbed in a hamam, interior designer Yelda Bayraktar had generously introduced me to a hidden world of antique dealers who work behind unmarked doors, and it was time to get down to work.

The young Biennial staff had offered to be part of a workshop to discuss what it meant to them to live in this city as part of my Other Voices Other Cities project. The group finally voted on ISTANBUL IS RELENTLESS As Ceylan Hepis said, ‘one moment you can be having a nice time with your friends in a club, the next, someone has been stabbed on the street’.

We decided to do a night shoot in Taksim Square, a central meeting point. We started with the longest word, RELENTLESS and as we moved on to ISTANBUL the police arrived and told us to stop shooting. I learned they had looked up the meaning of ‘relentless’ on the internet, and were not happy.

A noisy argument followed, with people on the square taking sides, and in the end, the police said it was okay, we could go on. A relief.