Tuesday May 22, 2012

So now no one can look at the representation of President Zuma’s genitalia on the Brett Murray’s painting in the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, any more.  This morning, two men walked into the gallery, and after one man painted a red X over the offending area, the other threw a can of black paint over the whole work, obscuring both the face and the body.

No issue has had the country so up in arms - on one side or the other – since, oh yes, since the Zuma rape case. 

My day started with a dash to a recording studio in Sea Point where the BBC had booked a studio for me to do a live interview on their World Service programme, commenting on the Zuma painting affair, and what the painting symbolized. The email from the BBC in London asking me to talk on the matter as Founding Editor of ArtThrob came yesterday, but this morning the hookup never came through. Presumably a bigger story had bumped the Zuma painting off the list.

Not in this country. Early today, Brett told me he had got his fighting spirit back after being thoroughly disorientated by the fury unleashed by his work. But two hours later, the news that a Shembe chief had said he should be subjected to a public stoning left him shaken again.

Who knows where it will all end.

Thursday May 17, 2012

WAM curator Fiona Rankin-Smith

Johannesburg was the place to be last week, with the opening of the gorgeous new Wits Art Museum attracting the entire local art world.  Serendipitously acronyming to WAM, the new multi level space offers unique exhibition opportunities.

Opening night at WAM

For the opening, WAM showcased key pieces from the Standard Bank Collection of African art, and works from its own collection. Although there were a number of extraordinary paintings on show, and it was a pleasure to see them again, there was a slightly dated air about it all: a feeling of work being brought out of storerooms. Nothing much by the new generation of artists.

 Levels are connected by shallow stairs

As one artist commented, the work will have to catch up with the space. 

If WAM is to realize its full potential, corporate and other patrons will have to be found to fund acquisitions, retrospectives and exhibitions of the kind of quality which will regenerate the local art scene and place WAM on the international agenda as an important destination. 

I can’t wait to see this happen.

 A quiet corner on the lowest level of WAM

Golden knuckle dusters on Brett Murray’s ‘Hail to the Thief ll’

Earlier on the very same evening, social satirist Brett Murray had opened his  ‘Hail to the Thief ll’ at the Goodman Gallery, releasing so many sharply barbed arrows aimed at government corruption that perhaps it was not surprising that given the sensitivity of our leaders, the Department of Arts and Culture subsequently phoned gallery owner Liza Essers to request a meeting about the work.

 Brett Murray and Liza Essers

As this goes to press, that meeting has not yet taken place, but work ranged from an exquisite pair of gold plated knuckle dusters with VIVA enameled in red on each, to some distinctly unflattering representations of President Zuma. See it all online at http://www.goodman-gallery.com/exhibitions/265

  Brett Murray’s Monopoly

Wednesday, May 2 2012

Twins, their outward similarities belying their inner differences, are the subject of Candice Breitz’s Factum series, which opened as part of ‘Extra!’ at the National Gallery last week. And right on cue, there were two of her subjects, who had flown in from Toronto especially for the opening. Rather like the pink clad fairies one always sees in Venice, Pauline and Mary Misericordia have flown around the world to be present wherever Factum opens, always dressing identically for the occasion, and in this case, bringing a spangly grey scarf for Candice as well.

Julia Rosa Clark 

The week before, Julia Rosa Clark’s ‘Booty’ opened at Whatiftheworld. Described by the artist as ‘Drawings’ these quirky mixed media works incorporate collage elements of every kind on richly painted backgrounds, evoking a cultural history of nostalgia and half buried memories, like a song one cannot quite remember, except for a single phrase which reverberates through the mind.

 Malibongwe Tyilo 

Meanwhile, fashionista blogger Malibongwe Tyilo (check his delicious site out at skattiewhatareyouwearing.blogspot.com) decided to compete with Julia’s artwork by swanning around in a jacket which could easily have gone up on the wall.

Minnette Vári Relaxing at lunch after her opening at the Goodman 

Minnette Vári looked delighted and relieved that her seven screen installation on her new show ‘Revenant’ was up and running, after last minute technical hitches kept the installation team up all night. Oh, the joys and terrors of technology. For every new media artist, it’s a love/hate relationship. Minnette’s compelling exhibition is themed around ‘an uncanny return’ and can be viewed at  http://www.goodman-gallery.com/exhibitions/262.

Gretchen van der Byl’s show at Commune 1 

In the relatively new space of Commune 1, (new as an art space, that is – the Wale Street building itself is old and beautiful) Gretchen van der Byl is showing ‘Today is the Yesterday of Tomorrow’. Gretchen is the tiny figure in black and white on the right in the photo, seen from above, next to her pristine architectural construction.

A portable horizon 

Her theme is the way we negotiate space in our daily lives, and her poetic Portable Horizon is a coil of dark thread which measures 29.0722 kilometres – the distance the horizon of the sea would measure if one were standing on a beach.

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

In many cities around the world - Manhattan, London and Stockholm, to name just three - art commissioned from local artists enlivens the subway stations, making the daily process of getting from one place to another much more fun. So it’s great to see the city of Cape Town applying the same process to the network of MyCiti bus stations spreading virally through the city. In 2010, I did a 19 panel design at the bus station at the airport, involving clouds and mountains and calligraphic quotes. A few weeks ago, curator Roger van Wyk invited me and four other artists to propose a design for the station opposite Thibault Square. The brief was to honour three early architects of Cape Town, including Louis Michel Thibault, designer of the historic Koopmans de Wet house, now a museum in Strand Street.

This week, we heard that the gig went to Julia Anastasapoulos, with one of the best designs for a bus station I’ve yet seen. Thibault used the classic golden mean system of proportions in making his designs, and Julia took the circles which had determined his structure and dropped in areas of transparent colour. A beautiful solution to honouring the architect, fully utilizing the glass panels of the bus station, and at the same time enriching the passengers’ experience of waiting for the bus to come.

It reminds me a bit of an old David Kramer song, where he talks about growing up in Worcester, and how the most exciting part of Sunday was standing at the front door looking at the cars going by outside, first through the green glass panel and then through the red.

Good Friday, April 6 2012

When a sense of loss is unbearable, can an acoustic envelope of music provide a way to alleviate pain? This is one of the questions introduced to her Cape Town  audience by the brilliant international academic, Griselda Pollock this week. Talking luminously about the little known German Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, who died in Auschwitz in 1943, Pollock showed images of the vibrant small paintings Salomon left behind. These chronicle a fictional account of her tragic life, complete with transparent overlays referencing the music to be listened to, or hummed, while looking at that image.  The artist’s self portrait is on the right above, next to the photo of Griselda, taken during her Michaelis talk.

More about the artist at http://www.jhm.nl/collection/themes/charlotte-salomon. Griselda Pollock can be referenced all over the web.

Chad Rossouw: Cape Town Overnight

Chad Rossouw’s ‘A History of Failure’  is on view at Brundyn & Gonsalves and is a dense imaginary of a scientific and engineering South African past … his elegant poster of a Zeppelin flying over the art deco Old Mutual building promises CAPE TOWN OVERNIGHT.

Stan Douglas: Malabar People: Owner/Bartender 1951

Was the 2^nd Johanneburg Biennale a failure? Only in that it was closed early by the main funders, the City of Johannesburg, and has never happened again. To the overseas critics who came to look and to those of use who were lucky enough to participate or to be there, it was a triumph. Curated by Okwui Enwezor, it was called “Trade Routes and Geography”

Penny Siopis: The Master is Drowning

In what may turn out to be the exhibition of the year, Joost Bosland has recalled those brilliant weeks which brought some of the top artists of the world to this country with an exhibition at the Stevenson entitled ‘Trade Routes Over Time’, The show  features work by a few of the many artists who took part, including Stan Douglas, Yinka Shonibare, Olafur Eliasson, Pierre Huyghe and South African artists Jo Ractliffe and Penny Siopis. 

Wednesday March 21, 2012

Last year, American artist Christian Marclay won the Golden Lion at Venice for his 24 hour video played in real time. ‘The Clock’ was an edit of thousands of cinematic clips which involved clocks or watches, and the magical part was that If, for instance, one was looking at Harold Lloyd hanging perilously from a clock above a New York street, one knew the exact time in real life was, in fact, 6.30.

For those who are interested in the process that lay behind this masterpiece, the latest New Yorker has an extended piece on Marclay and the three year marathon making of the ‘The Clock’

Here is a trailer, one of several available on youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp4EUryS6ac

But what really caught my attention was this. Last week, I talked about Mark Dion’s comment that an artist’s particular methodology should be able to be adapted to any context. Marclay started as a DJ, playing scratched and broken records, and then made works using broken records. An artwork involving a collage of cracked vinyl pieces may seem a long way from ‘The Clock’, but the impulse to edit existing material is the same.

Much as we all adore Athi Patra Ruga, one might have wished that a stronger desire for a rigorous edit had arisen in his breast as one sat through a somewhat tortuous performance of his rite of passage piece, ‘Ilulwane’, at the Long Street Baths last week.

The red lighting on the water was gorgeous. The synchronized swimmers looked good for the first fifteen minutes, after which they did not seem to be particularly energized, or in time. They were probably cold by then, poor things.

The video projection stuttered through images of piers off the west side of lower Manhattan (I think), a ceremony of robed figures, and a herd of goats, and eventually against this backdrop, the floating artist was hauled from the water and suspended above the pool, high heels casting a dramatic shadow on the wall. By then, though, the videos had become repetitious and had gone on too long.

The ability of the artist to endure has to be balanced against the desire of the audience to reach closure.

Cape Town has another new art space. For a gallery located inside a hotel, the Upper Eastside in Woodstock, it has an odd name: The Museum Gallery. This week, first time exhibitor Sally Berg opened her introspective painting show ‘In the flesh’ in the lower part of the gallery. Visit on Saturdays until March 31.

Rebecca Kotane

For the first time in my life, a few Sundays ago, I was in the presence of a person who was a hundred years old. it was the 100th birthday of the redoubtable Rebecca Kotane, widow of struggle hero Moses Kotane, and the celebration lunch was being held in the Walter Sisulu Hall in Soweto. Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe was there, and Frank Chikane, and I was accompanying Amina Cachalia, who had also been invited to speak.

The centenarian looked fully composed and sensible of her remarkable achievement in reaching such an advanced age. When her husband went into exile in the apartheid years, she remained at home, becoming a symbol of all the women who had to hold their lives together with little support from their absent husbands.

Rebecca Kotane cuts the cake, flanked by DP Kgalema Motlanthe

Her primrose yellow silk dress with a matching hat ensured that she stood out amongst all the other darker hued finery worn in her honour, and a silk flower on her dress in deepest violet was matched by a pair of satin gloves.

My new work involves an inter-generational investigation, in listening to the stories and values of the powerful women of the Mandela era, and listening also to the challenges thrown up by the new generation, the born frees, their granddaughters. I’m not yet sure quite where it’s all going, but that is the interesting thing about starting new work.

You make a start somewhere, and flounder along for a while until gradually the murk clears and a structure begins to emerge. You just have to have faith that with time and energy, the process will impose its own sense.

Mark Dion

Back in Cape Town, I went to a lecture given at Michaelis by Documenta artist Mark Dion. I was struck particularly by the truth of one thing he said. When students show him work insisting that the methodology and the context are indivisible, he tells them to forget about the context next time, and take the methodology and apply it elsewhere.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Design Indaba finished last week, bringing with it one of the most highly regarded curators in the world, Hans Ulrich Obrist, as a guest speaker. As a day ticket to hear him speak would have cost R2 600, I did not hear his presentation, but later that day, Obrist came round to the Goodman Gallery to meet artists in a series of short speed dates. ‘Hello … nice to meet you again …yes, I am enjoying Cape Town … now tell me about your work’.

Obrist is on record as saying he loves talking to artists and exchanging ideas, so it was a pleasure to renew an acquaintance first made over breakfast in Dakar a few years ago. A slightly nerve racking pleasure.

Lisa Brice at the Goodman Gallery

In town this week is Lisa Brice, here from London for the opening of her show at the Goodman. It’s on Saturday, and the paintings that have gone up are her strongest yet. Brice was included in one of the latest Phaidon books, Vitamin P2; New perspectives in painting. A real achievement.