Two weeks in the art world

Week One: Johannesburg, February 11

Writer Matthew Krouse leans in to catch curator Okwui Enwezor’s every word at the press preview of  ‘The Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life’. 

This mega exhibition – more than 800 works are on show – has moved to the MuseumAfrica in Newtown, Johannesburg from New York, Munich and Milan.

The indefatigable Okwui Enwezor

Artist Nandipha Mntambo at the press preview. Love the shoes.

This is the seating area in Serge Nitegeka’s studio in the End Street area of midtown Joburg. It’s the neatest artist’s studio I’ve ever been in bar none.

Freedom Park in Pretoria opened a while ago, so being in Joburg provided us with an opportunity to drive over and have a look.

 And in case you were wondering exactly what the mandate of the new museum is:  the displays start imaging South Africa 3.6 billion years ago, working their way up through colonization, industrialization, apartheid, freedom, and in one small room, poignant videos from the hearings of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission.

Clive van den Berg was responsible for the art and design of the sophisticated and complex installations, like this one, which records the early days of the country.

And this one, which explores slavery. It’s salutary to see this fraught subject addressed through a contemporary art installation, rather than through boards of text.

On Friday, I drop in at the Artists’ Press, located in the Bus Factory in Newtown. The studio is fully equipped to make prints of all kinds, and has an important training programme for would-be printmakers.

Week Two: Cape Town, February 20

Cameron Platter is showing at What If the World, and this evening ArtThrob editor Matthew Blackman interviews him at the gallery about his art making process.

The striking large yellow and black triptych in this photo is a drawing which  Cameron describes as a collage of a fast food menu, a pornographic video and Matisse’s Stations of the Cross. When questioned by Matthew as to why he is so fond of drawing chicken, Cameron replies mysteriously, ‘When I’m drawing chicken, I’m not thinking about chicken.’

Wim Botha’s new exhibition ‘Linear Perspectives’ opens at the Stevenson. It’s a great show. Some sculptural pieces are in cardboard painted black, some bronzes have been cast from a Styrofoam maquette and painted black. And then there are Carrera marble sculptures splashed with black paint – like Platter, Botha enjoys playing with conventional art practice.

Famed British designer Thomas Heatherwick, here to talk at Design Indaba, is revealed as the architect of the new Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art. At a press preview at the Zeitz Pavilion at the Waterfront, Heatherwick takes his audience through the design decisions that have been made which will transform the old silos into a stunning new museum, planned to open in 2016.

I am given an interview slot with Heatherwick following the press conference, and will write up a story of the new MOCAA later this week.

The old silo, presently in the early stages of conversion into a magnificent contemporary museum

At the Slave Lodge, Siemon Allen, who has been living and working in the US for more than a decade, is showing ‘Labels’. An obsessive researcher, Allen has assembled thousands of record labels of South African music, and hung them in plastic sleeves to create a walkway through the exhibition space. One wishes it were possible for the labels to operate like touch screens – allowing a gentle touch on a label to fill the air with music.

ArtThrob staffers Chad Rossouw and Matthew Blackman at the ArtThrob stand on the Cape Town Art Fair – its second manifestation.

This time around, the Cape Town Art Fair was staged in what was once the BMW Pavilion at the Waterfront. The circular layout allowed exhibitors the freedom to get away from the normal gridlike stands at an art fair. The galleries put on a good show, and most people seemed to agree it was a big success. Much better than the first attempt last year. I certainly enjoyed it.

Brett Murray lets it all out

February 16, 2014

At the end of January, on one of those Book Lounge evenings which have become a fixture on the calendars of Capetonians, Brett Murray launched his eponymous monograph to a packed audience, introduced by cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro. Always ready to turn his sardonic eye upon himself, Murray referred to his book as representing ‘nothing more than the end result of a massive mid-life crisis. It was either do this book or get a Harley Davidson and grow a ponytail and trawl the bars on Long Street’.

If you Google Murray’s gallery, the Goodman, the words which come up on the drop down menu, are ‘zuma’ and ‘the spear’ – references to that astonishing moment of cultural conflagration in May 2012 when the wrath of the entire State seemed focused on Brett Murray’s painting of President Zuma, dressed as Lenin, but with a flaccid appendage on display.  

A press photo of a painting on his solo show at the Goodman which the artist had intended as a sarcastic visual comment on a morally weak president  rapidly went viral, attracting international attention.  Locally, the artist found himself under threat of being stoned to death.

Looking back at the entire brouhaha, Murray commented: ‘It’s just a pity that all the work I have produced up to The Spear, and all the work I will make going forward will always be seen in relation to this event. 

‘It nearly didn’t see the light of day. I was ambivalent about adding the dick to the painting. I thought then, and still do now, that it might have been a stronger and a more layered work without it’.

It is unlikely that there will ever be again an artwork that will provoke such a storm.  Murray’s speech presented his case for making the work in the first place, and for artistic freedom, and  dissected in detail the often ludicrous legal proceedings which followed.

You’ll find the full text of Murray’s speech on his website 

2013 in Review

JANUARY

 Opening night visitors chat between two constructions by Serge Alain Nitegeka at the Stevenson Cape Town.

In a new video, an animated William Kentridge is pursued through the pages of a book by a calligraphic version of himself. At the Goodman Cape.

Lisa Brice and I go to supper at Sean O’Toole’s and I am impressed by the simplicity of the bookcase Sean has had made for himself.

FEBRUARY

Philip Miller watches francolins jockeying for position at the water bowl at Churchhaven

I go to Switzerland to make plans for the Paul Klee Museum Sommerakademie. I forget my CANON G10, so I have to photograph the snowy landscape through the window on my old Nokia.

Moshekwa Langa opens at the Goodman Cape. It’s great to see him again, and the work is great too.

MARCH

This is the month that I work with the Monkey Films crew to document the conversations between grandmothers and granddaughters in Soweto. Here, I capture Mpume and the 101-year-old Rebecca Kotane between takes.

The memorial service in the Wits Great Hall for the much beloved Amina Cachalia is extremely moving. The grandchildren each recount personal memories. Above, Coco and Luiza Cachalia.

Candice Breitz brings ‘The Woods’ to the Johannesburg Goodman – work reflecting on child actors in the film industries of Hollywood, Bollywood and Nollywood. Here, a moment from The Audition.

APRIL

Artist Robin Rhode and ArtThrob staffer Chad Rossouw at the opening of Robin’s show at the Stevenson in Cape Town.

The giant crayons Robin had fabricated for children to add to his black wall drawings.

 I have tea with dancer extraordinaire Nelisiwe Xaba to discuss her performance workshop at the Sommerakademie in August.

MAY

My show ‘All Our Mothers’ opens at the Goodman Johannesburg. It is a six screen video installation. There are last minute technical problems but they get solved. Most of the participants are able to come to the opening. I am floating with relief.

Two weeks after ‘All Our Mothers’ opens, I head for Venice, and the Biennale. Our hotel is the one with the green canopy. It’s an old monastery.

In the relatively quiet days before the VIP previews at the Biennale, Brenton Maart stands in front of Joanne Bloch’s work in the South African pavilion.

JUNE

The most interesting thing about this pedestrian rendering of the figure of a pregnant thalidomide victim is that artist Marc Quinn actually managed to make his inflatable look like marble. From a distance.

One of the hot tickets at the Biennale was the Prada Foundation’s recreation of the iconic Harald Szeeman show of 1969: ‘When Attitudes become Form’.

We’re all smiling because we’ve managed to get to the head of the two hour queue by spotting a friend right up front.

JULY

It’s school holidays. My family explores the cave at Arniston, on the Southern Cape coast.

Jo Ractliffe’s exhibition ‘The Borderlands’, exploring the aftermath of war on the communities involved, opens at the Stevenson.

A winter sunrise photographed from my balcony

AUGUST

In mid August, ‘All Our Mothers’ moves to the Goodman Cape Town.

A few days after the opening of ‘All Our Mothers’, I fly to Bern to take up the exciting position of guest curator of the 2013 Paul Klee Sommerakademie. The daily discussions of the twelve fellows are interrupted by an outing into the mountains.

In this blurry late night shot (by Jelena Martinovic) a famous curator displays a killing technique at the ping pong table.  

SEPTEMBER

Back in South Africa, a weekend at Churchhaven produces an unexpected event: the birth of three little stripey mice in Penny Siopis’ bed.

In the Annexe of the National Gallery, ‘The Difference Loom’ explores the links between textile art and technology. In this detail from the Keiskamma Art Project’s Guernica, a woman holds the body of a person dying of AIDS.

At the Goodman, Clive van den Berg’s confidently assertive and sumptuously  textured painting, Underneath l, on his show ‘Land Throws Up a Ghost’ also reflects on the ravages of AIDS, worked in a very different way: the brilliant colouring belying the somber theme.  It’s a remarkable piece of art.

OCTOBER

Alumni House at Macalaster College, Saint Paul, Minneapolis, is my home for a week while I undertake a project with first year photography students.

The students’ task is to interview and take photographs of AIDS activists to make audio visual presentations for the Macalaster Global Health Colloquium.

On my way back from Minneapolis, I catch the new photographers show at the New York MoMA. Brendon Fowler crashes and smashes his framed images together to make sculptural objects. Quite interesting.

NOVEMBER

In Hong Kong, students from SCAD take me on a tour of the city to find the right location for the photoshoot for the Other Voices: Hong Kong project.

In a Hong Kong street market, SCAD staffers Carl Johnson and Van Chiu hold up samples of the coloured lights we will edge the letters with for the Voices project.

The Hong Kong students’ statement about the essential nature of life in Hong Kong is NO TIME TO STROLL.  We shoot the sequence at a busy downtown corner. The blue lighting spills onto the road.

Collector and magnate Jochen Zeitz announces the launch of the new Museum of Contemporary African Art at the V&A Waterfront

In Cape Town, new political party Agang leader, the highly esteemed Mamphela Ramphele, invites local artists to lunch to discuss a cultural agenda for Agang.

DECEMBER

The father of the nation dies, and across the country his death is mourned and his life is celebrated.