Tuesday, 4th December

Nicholas Hlobo’s monstrously engorged black rubber creature fills an entire gallery at the Stevenson on Joost Buckland’s ‘Fiction as Fiction (or a ninth Johannesburg Biennale)’ in the latest show to open for the Cape Town summer season. A longing for the reinstatement of the Johannesburg Biennale, presented only twice, in 1995 and 1997 is a perennial theme in the South African art world, and here Buckland expertly puts together his concept of what such an event might have looked like today… It is hard to single out artists in this fine show, but look out for strong work by Kemang Wa Lehulere as you walk into the Stevenson.

The New Church Gallery in Tamboerskloof, Cape Town

The first big show to start the ball rolling was the opening of the innovative New Church Gallery, the brainchild of collector Piet Viljoen, who took the unprecedented (iin South Africa) step of buying an entire house to display a changing selection of  works from his exceptional collection.

Wim Botha, Amanda Bloch and Piet Viljoen

Half of the top floor of the Victorian house in New Church Street has been removed to make a space for large scale installations – in the case of the first show, curated by Penny Siopis and appropriately called No. 1 - the dominating work is a suspended steel and fluorescent light tube work by Wim Botha. Other artists on the show included Bridget Baker, Paul Edmunds and Georgina Gratrix. In his opening speech, Viljoen talked of how his love of art had enriched his life, and finished by encouraging his audience to ‘Buy art!’ If only … The New Church will be open by appointment, and soon perhaps at a regular time weekly.

Brett Murray, Sanell Aggenbach, and Jeanne and Conrad Botes.

On Wednesday of last week, Mikhael Subotzky’s Standard Bank Young Artist show, ‘Retinal Shift’ opened at the National Gallery in Cape Town. The crowds at the opening did not allow for sustained viewing of the artist’s four channel video based on an interview with of one of guards at the Monument Theatre in Grahamstown, where the show started. But one was able to view a multitude of photos from Subotzky’s working life, hung salon style and utterly riveting.

Mikhael Subotzky stands in front of photographs of his own eyeballs, a key image in ‘Retinal Shift’ 

Last night, thick black braided ropes guided viewers up the steps of the City Hall and towards installations by local artists. One trail led to a little nook under the stairs, lined with tartan plastic. There, if you had the patience to sit down for a few hours, a Congolese duo would add braids to your own hairdo, making it as spectacular as you wished. It was all a part of the GIPCA Live Art Festival, which, in a five day programme, included performances all around the city.

Hair braiding as performance on GIPCA’S  Live Art Festival

Opening at the Goodman in Cape Town on the 18^th, is the latest William Kentridge exhibition, with the rather South African sounding title of ‘NO, IT IS’. Perfectly timed for the summer season.

Sunday, November 18, 2012

It can be a mistake to take biographical information which appears on the internet as accurate.  I recently visited struggle veteran Vesta Smith (above) in her Noordgesig, Soweto home. On her wall, was a powerful and moving poem especially commissioned by the Legal Resources Centre to honour Vesta for her enormous contribution to the struggle in South Africa. The poem was given to Vesta at a special ceremony in August this year, and lauds her courage and tenacity.

The mistake? The poem hails Vesta  as a ‘resilient daughter of Sophiatown’  - (probably the most famous Johannesburg area to undergo forced removals) but in fact,  Vesta  was not born or ever lived in Sophiatown.  

The Alps float behind the city of Bern

From Johannesburg, I went on to Bern, in Switzerland. I have been appointed guest curator for next year’s Sommerakademie at the Paul Klee Zentrum, and this was a planning session for next August. Artists and curators under the age of  35 are eligible for selection, and can either be nominated by one of the designated nominators … or can nominate themselves. Twelve will be chosen for the two week event.  So if you want to know more, check out the website, www.zpk.org

Sigmar Polke’s agate windows

My last day in Switzerland was spent  in Zurich with Jacqueline Burckhardt, director of the Sommerakademie, and co-editor of Parkett magazine.  One of her past curatorial projects was to find an artist to design new windows for the Grossmunster Church in Zurich, a project completed in 2009. German painter Sigmar Polke chose sliced agate to make this glowing window, one of the series of 12. A remarkable solution to classic stained glass. It was his last project before his death.

October 27, 2012

Joost Bosland sent me this pic of Penny Siopis’ name up in lights at the Prince Charles Cinema in London’s Leicester Square. As part of the events around mega art fair Frieze, where the Stevenson Gallery was showing for the first time, Penny was invited to screen her four short films, made between 1997 and 2012. The programme was entitled ‘This is a True Story’. 

 Video still from Penny Siopis’ ‘The Master is Drowning’ 2012

For her films, Penny combines documentary footage with found home movie inserts, often sourced from charity shops, to create a strange crossover between historical fact, like the attempted assassination of Nationalist prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd, and the random. Old film footage has a very particular quality, a colour range which cannot really be reproduced with contemporary materials, which locate her films firmly in the past. At the same time, the disjuncture between the narrative and the images on the screen gives them an almost hallucinatory, dreamlike quality which relates to the fragmentary and imperfect nature of memory. 

  A performance by Pedro Gomez-Egena’s paper dinosaur at Blank Projects

‘Machine Worries, Machine Hearts’ was the title of a group show curated by Anthea Buys which took the ambivalent relationship between humans and machines as a theme. One evening this week, an appreciative crowd witnessed a paper dinosaur make the slow descent from a high, threatening stance to a grovel on the floor. 

The artist was South American Pedro Gomez-Egena, and his koki and cut paper dinosaur controlled by wires and weights showed that successful large scale kinetic sculptures can be made from the simplest materials.

 Johannesburg style captured by blogger Scott Schuman on The Sartorialist

As many of you probably already know, fashion photographer Scott Schumann is one of the most indefatigable bloggers around, often updating his site www.thesartorialist.com more than once a day with great street style shots from around the world. 

Late this week, some images appeared datelined Downtown Johannesburg, including the one above. The comments column carried responses both from Joburgers swooning that Scott had actually arrived in Jozi, and the usual comments directed at the clothes and the style of the person in the pic.

Predictably, a few people said they thought the woman in the background more interesting than the man. I liked this response from Camille Reddress: 

Funny how lots of people want to see ‘the woman in the background’. They see an African woman in a headwrap and a burden on her head and see it as more ‘exotic’ or ‘authentic’. Interesting. That is why I love your shots Scott because you photograph what you see not what is perceived to be ‘typical’ of a place or people.
Yep, this S.A man loves his camel coat and he looks amazing in it.

Atish Jogi then commented:

The shoes are old golf shoes, it is likely that this man has worked as or is currently working as a caddy at one of the many golf courses in Johannesburg. Great Shot! Welcome to South Africa!

This know-it-all response received a come-uppance from Energie who wrote:

I’m sorry, but you have absolutely no way of being able to make that assumption – he could have bought the shoes, or assuming they are golf shoes, he could be a golf player. You have no way of assuming that he is/was a caddy.

In South Africa, even comments on fashion blogs reflect attitudes towards race and gender.

Friday, October 5, 2012

An army of tiny men are scaling Lady Gaga's naked body in a black and white poster for her new perfume looming above Times Square. It is mid September in New York, and I have just left the press conference for 'The Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life' at the International Center of Photography, two blocks over at the corner of 43rd and 6th Avenue. 

The show has been curated by Okwui Enwezor and Rory Bester, and it is overwhelming: more than 500 photos, videos and memorabilia fill the two floors of the ICP, most of the material almost unknown to an American audience. All the usual suspects are represented, from Eli Weinberg and the Drum magazine archive to David Goldblatt and Gideon Mendel. 

On Friday, critic Holland Cotter gives the show a thumbs up, with a major review in the New York Times. 

It's certainly a South African moment in New York. In the same issue of the Times, Cotter reviews the show at the Walther Collection Project Space, 'Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive Part 1'.  In this fine Chelsea space, Santu Mofokeng's The Black Photo Album series, for which Mofokeng rephotographed old family photographs from around South  Africa hangs opposite ethnographic photographs from the Duggan Cronin  Archive.  An interesting face-off. Tamar Garb was the curator.

And one floor above the Walther Project, Cedric Nunn, who is also on the ICP show, has a solo at the David Krut Gallery.

September is a wonderful month to be in New York. Still warm, but crisp, and all the galleries are opening up again after the summer with new shows. Curator Laurie Farrell comes up for the weekend, and we have a great time gallery hopping. Our favourite show in Chelsea:_Jesper Just's 'This Nameless Spectacle' at the James Cohan Gallery, a sexually ambiguous fable of an apparently wheelchair bound woman and her sojourn through a city ..

September 1, 2012

  

I am chugging through the German countryside south of Munich, white and brown cows in green fields to my left, an ancient red roofed village to my right. The train is headed for Rome, and up to now, my grand European tour by train has been nothing but a pleasure, relaxing in first class seats with little snacks brought to me while I tap away on the computer.

Breakfast on the Deutschebahn train

A Eurail ticket for six days first class unlimited travel through four countries costs less than two economy return flights between Joburg and Cape Town, and I can highly recommend it. Up to now, that is. This train is uncomfortably full, and on top of that, instead of proceeding to Bologna where I would have changed for Rome, there has just been an announcement that passengers to Italy will have to get off the train at Innsbruck and catch a bus to Brenner and get another train to Bologna from there. Damn.

To go back to the beginning of this trip, my first stop was Bern in Switzerland, for the annual Nominators Day of the Sommerkademie of the Paul Klee Centre. For this event, 12 under 35 artists are nominated from around the world, and come together for 12 days of intense workshops and art experiences. This year, the event kicked off with presentations by each of the fellows, a display of highly accomplished and diverse practices.  (Outside the train window the landscape is getting rapidly more mountainous, forested slopes crowned with clouds). One South African nominee had been awarded a fellowship - Mohau Modisakeng – but he was not amongst the other fellows. The story was that he had not applied for a visa until the last minute and would arrive the following Tuesday. He never did show up. 

From Bern, which also included such cooling activities as blowing bubbles at sunset next to the river, (top pic), I went to the Basque coast of France, Biarritz, to spend a few days with my brother, and then up to Paris. My hotel here was the La Louisiane, perfectly located off the Boulevard St Germain, and really reasonable. Gus van Sant is said to make this his Paris stop.

Surfboarding class on the Biarritz beach

I only have 24 hours in Paris, so I have to make some quick decisions. Gerhard Richter is showing at the Pompidou. A good place to start. Outside the Pompidou an old man with a trolley is feeding a vast flock of pigeons with purloined cake. 

 Let them eat cake

Inside, Richter’s retrospective takes us through the whole career of the master German painter, from his early monochromatic paintings based on black and white photographs with seductively smudged edges through to his gorgeous colour portraits and abstractions. The lucid artist’s statements which accompany the changes in direction give a clear insight into Richter’s thoughts.

One of Gerhard Richter’s portraits of his daughter Betty

From here, it’s on to La Maison Rouge, an art gallery constructed around an old red house, which will host an exhibition of South African art as part of the South Africa/France cultural season next year. Foamy suds are sliding down the roof and into the courtyard as I leave for my last stop of the day, the Palais de Tokyo, where the Paris Triennale is in its final days.

La Maison Rouge

I have a dinner date, so cannot linger, and do not see Nicholas Hlobo’s piece or Guy Tillim’s photos, but I am again struck by Chris Ofili’s’ gorgeous paintings, two executed in the style which filled the British Pavilion in Venice in 2006 -  a  palette of red, green and black dots, made brilliant by the addition of tiny mirrors, and a later work, in the lush ochres, inky greens, wines and purples of a Gauguin.

Chris Ofili on the Paris Triennale

Reaching the Gare de l’Est at an early hour at which tout Paris seems still asleep – or perhaps it’s just because it’s Saturday – I board the train for Kassel, home of the most important contemporary art event in the world, so carefully planned it happens only once every five years. I’m talking of course about Documenta (13), curated this time around by Carolyn Christov Bakargiev.

From tomorrow I will be viewing the delights – or otherwise - of Documenta with writer Sean O’ Toole and artist Lisa Brice, but on this first afternoon I will go to one of the most highly recommended works – a performance experience by Tino Seghal. The line to enter the door of what looks like a garden shed is long. And when you get to the door, one steps into a room which is totally pitch black.  Nothing visible. But ones ears become ones eyes … chanting, humming, rhythmic explosive sounds are happening all around. Someone pats me lightly on the chest in passing.  It’s like being thrown blindfolded onto a stage where something really interesting is going on.  A visceral body experience in which one feels even more included in this charismatic group as one’s eyes gradually become accustomed to the dim light and can ascertain the performers, who on one occasion drop to the ground and wriggle between the legs of the disconcerted audience.

Gerard Byrne’s A man and a woman make love

An hour passes, and I leave, moving next door to the fifties style ballroom on an old hotel, where Gerard Byrne’s piece A man and a woman make love is projected onto a number of screens set at angles around the floor. It’s an acted out conversation between members of the surrealist group on the mechanics and conventions of lovemaking.

I have four more days of Documenta, and I can’t wait.

August 22, 2012

A minor but nonetheless not-to-be-neglected decision comes up for every artist before the opening of his or her exhibition: What shall I wear? Some take the easy route by wearing the same kind of I’m-the-artist torn jeans and grubby T-shirt  worn every day to the studio. Others choose the occasion to make a strong fashion statement, making clear to the world, I-maybe-an-artist-but–I-do-know-how-to-dress.

And then there’s the solution chosen by Husain and Hasan Essop at the opening of their recent show ‘Remembrance’ at the Goodman Gallery, Cape Town. The theme of their exhibition was a lucid and beautiful photographic exploration of religious spaces, both Muslim and Christian, in various parts of the world.

It was totally appropriate, then, that the twins clad themselves in the fabric of their photogoraphic imagery, as it were … and wore jackets fabricated from prayers mats, Husain in green and Hasan in blue.

For those interested in learning more about the Essops’ work, and what led them to undertake their journeys to some of the great religious centres of the world, there will be a panel discussion at the Goodman at 11 a.m. on Saturday, September 1 at 11 a.m.

Sunday, August 5, 2012

As every artist knows, raising funding for the production of a new art piece, an exhibition, or a catalogue is one of the most difficult tasks around. There is not a lot of money available for art projects, and everyone wants a piece of the pie, so when a visiting American filmmaker raved about  www.kickstarter.com, a creative funding platform, I couldn’t wait to look at the site. (One of the current projects seeking funding is pictured above – Vincent Ward wants to mount an installation at the Shanghai Biennale).

The Kickstarter premise is that many people would like to financially support creative projects that appeal to them, but they don’t have much money to give. So donors can pledge as little as $5 – and the money will only go to the project if the target figure set by the artist is met by a certain date. Artists offer thank you gifts for donors – which might range from a special postcard to, if it is a really big donation, a listing as a producer in the credits of a film.

This week, the New Yorker carries a joke in which some prisoners are standing around in a prison yard, and one is saying: ‘Thanks to Kickstarter we’re building a tunnel’. Which shows the extent to which Kickstarter  has entered popular culture.

Most regrettably, Kickstarter is only available in the United States, because of the payment system. Damn. Won’t someone start it here?

Durant Basi Sihlali (SA 1935 - 2005)

 Lithograph, 

"Loading Coal" 

40 x 57 cm

Talking about artists and money … it has been sad to read recent stories in the Mail & Guardian about the lawyer who apparently has in his possession millions of rands worth of artworks left behind by Durant Sihlali after he died of a heart attack in 2004. The lawyer, Mafika Sihlali, who may or may not be related to the artist, is currently out on bail on a charge of defrauding the SABC, and nobody (except, presumably, the lawyer) knows quite where the paintings are. Durant Sihlali’s widow Anna has laid a charge of theft against the lawyer.

Sihlali was one of the country’s leading artists, and apart from the loss of income to his widow, the disapearance of his work is an enormous blow to the country’s cultural heritage. One can only hope that his paintings are safely in storage somewhere, and one day will reappear.

Sue Williamson    

Cheryl Carolus, 1990

59 x 39 cm 

Pigment inks on archival paper.

I have committed to a show on the Cape Town Month of Photography in September. The theme this year is Autobiography: Chronicles of Our Times. 

Although I have used photography in my work many times, it’s always been as part of a larger project: this is the first time I will show photographs by themselves. 

I decided to go back through all my old negatives, and print up portraits of women I have taken over the years. Some of the images I have seen up to now only as  postage stamp sized on a contact sheet … like this one, of Cheryl Carolus.

I took this in 1990, when Cheryl  was still very much the activist, before the years when she became South African High Commissioner in London and more recently, chairperson of SAA.