Thursday, January 26, 2012

As January hits the third week of the month, the city’s art galleries take down the group shows directed at the summer visitors, and get serious again. Or, relatively serious.

At blank projects last week, Avant Car Guard and friends were staging a finissage. The text on one of their banner pieces read, IF YOU DIE, CAN I HAVE YOUR CELL PHONE ? Perhaps only in South Africa could this statement seem like a reasonable request.

Across the road from blank, at the Stevenson, Viviane Sassen’s seductive, off kilter images are a complete antidote to the perfectly lit, carefully placed subjects one has grown accustomed to encountering on gallery walls.

Viviane Sassen’s Kapijmpange

In this portrait of a young girl, the focus of Sassen’s attention is the fragile, rose printed voile of her dress. In order to concentrate on this gentle texture, the girl’s features have been lost in a soft dark pool. Conversely, this makes her more magnetic than if we had been able to discern every eyelash.

Stuart Bird’s Blood Knot

Round the corner at the Goodman, Stuart Bird has mounted his first solo show, and displays a dazzling virtuosity in his handling of materials. Blood Knot is the title of a searing Athol Fugard play about two half brothers, one black, one half white. it is also the title of Bird’s intertwined knotted sculpture, made not of rope, but carved, meticulously and sinuously, from wood.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

A performance detail from Athi-Patra Ruga’s Ilulwane

It’s really too hot to work today. Come on, it’s a baking 34°C, or 93.2° F. Of course, there’s no air con in the studio. And if you open the windows more than a crack or turn up the fan, papers blow everywhere.

So I’m trying to keep cool by writing about Athi Patra Ruga’s watery Ilulwane at the RoseLee Goldberg-directed Performa Biennial of performance in New York last November.

Ruga drew part of his inspiration from the 1970s and 80s photographs of Alvin Baltrop, a photographer who struggled for recognition for his photos of queer life on the West side piers of Manhattan. Baltrop died in 2004, and it is only now that his work is beginning to be exhibited in mainstream galleries. Working with Baltrop’s evocative visual references, Ruga added elements from his own Xhosa culture, on initiation ceremonies, and also reflected on the AIDS crisis to build up his 45 minute synchronized swimming performance.

A performance detail from Athi-Patra Ruga’s Ilulwane

Synchronized swimming? This is a sport I have always associated with ruched floral bathing suits and colour coordinated rubber caps. I believe Ilulwane will be performed in South Africa later this year. I can’t wait to see how Ruga pulled all these diverse elements together.

Thursday, January 5, 2012

Storm Janse van Rensburg and Claire van Blerck


One of the best things about the New Year is the opportunity given to wipe last year’s messy slate clean again. Emails one should have – but did not – respond to ages ago can now be sent out with Happy New Year wishes and the recipient will probably forgive you.

This period of armistice doesn’t last long, however – after January 15 the truce is toast.

It’s also the time of year to make a list of all the half formed projects in your mind, and see which ones have strong enough legs to warrant further work. And which ones can be dumped right now.

Over at the Goodman Cape last week, the artists gathered for end of year drinks and to say goodbye to Storm Janse van Rensburg, who is off to Berlin. The incoming director is Federico Freschi, currently associate professor in the history of art department at Wits. Let’s raise a glass to his success.

Stuart Bird’s carved wooden text piece overcame at least some of the artist’s difficulties when it sold on opening night at the Goodman Cape Summer Show.

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.