DAC Venice fiasco. Again.

On the 15^th September 2014 Ms Refilwe Zulu of the Department of Arts and Culture signed a covering letter calling for curatorial bids for the South African pavilion at the next Venice Biennale, to be held from May 9 to November 22 2015. Here’s the link: 

https://www.dac.gov.za/sites/default/files/Covering%20letter.pdf

The closing date for bids is 11 a.m. on Monday, October 13, 2014. 

The information that the DAC is calling for tenders appeared on the VANSA site on September 29, which is where I picked it up for the first time today. The DAC will give no briefing.

So there is now a bare two weeks left for curators to put together a bid for this major international event, even though the Department of Arts and Culture has committed to a long term rental of the space and has been fully aware that the next Biennale has been coming up for the past two years.

This is a total disgrace, and once more, an insult to the art community. 

Here is a short extract from the document laying out the requirements:

‘The appointed service provider will be responsible for the following: 

Creative/Curatorial

• Concept and planning of the exhibition
• Design of exhibition space
• Theme of the exhibition
• Commissioning of new art works
• Selection of artists
• Content of catalogue

Logistics

• Design and construction of exhibition
• Transport and Insurance
• Mounting and dismantling
• Venue security

• Liaison with Commissioner
• Liaison with Biennale organizers
• Mounting and dismantling of exhibition

Marketing and PR

• Marketing & PR material including catalogue printing, written material and social media
• Catalogue design
• Press material
• Press releases and interviews
• Profiling of exhibition

Management

• Management of artists and contractual arrangements
• Reporting and monitoring 
• Day to day liaison with service providers in both countries
• Contingency plan’

Detailed financial plans are also required. Also to be completed in two weeks! We as the art community need to stand up and let the DAC know exactly what we think. 

Why on earth didn’t this document go out at the beginning of this year with a three month deadline to allow for critical consideration and the proper drawing up of plans?

Clearly, the DAC took absolutely no notice of the fury they engendered in 2012 when they followed the same path with a last minute call for a curator. They simply don’t care.

Send us your comments and we will pass them on to the DAC

Highlights of the last month

September 18, 2014

I love the cartoon above from a recent New Yorker. It so beautifully skewers the pretension inherent in the way some artists (and critics) write about their work. And I specially love the way this dog is stretching his little paws to emphasize the difficult physicality of his practice.

Talking about the difficult physicality of practice – one of the most brilliant performances I have ever seen was Un-Mute on the opening night of the recent Live Art Festival in Cape Town.  This was the second manifestation of GIPCA’s Live Art Festival, ten days of performance art, and like the first, was directed by the indefatigable Jay Pather.

Andile Vellem is a choreographer and dancer who is deaf, and communicates to his fellow dancers by signing. in Un-Mute he worked with Themba Mbuli and two dancers whose disability requires they move around in wheelchairs: Nadine Mckenzie and Zama Sonjica. The interaction between the performers and the wheelchairs was a masterpiece of drama and fierce timing. 

The wheelchairs themselves were driven with such skill by Mackenzie and Sonjica, that they seemed alive, wheeling, spinning, charging across the stage as their owners were lifted or flung out of the chairs by the other two dancers. One might imagine that owning a pair of functioning legs was an essential for a dancer. Not in this case.

Over at the Goodman, in his exhibition, ‘Show and Tell’, Mikhael Subotzky was also concerned with the limitations of the senses and how that limitation might be transcended As a photographer, Subotzky’s interest is in our sense of vision, and in the difference between the images which imprint themselves on the retina and how we actually perceive them – a perception governed not only by reality but by the conditioning of a whole slew of social factors.

Most of us remember those once popular stereograms that at first appeared to be an impenetrable overall pattern, but if you squinted slightly and stared hard, the pattern would miraculously reassemble itself into a flat background and a foreground object. In the largest work on his show, Sibidia Autosterogram, Subotzky  produces a wall sized version of this, projecting a jiggling pattern of brilliantly coloured pixels whose rapid movements make it even more difficult to penetrate the flat surface to the action behind.

It may seem quite a leap to go from Subotzky’s esoteric experimentations to Michael Taylor’s playful figurative paintings on his Whatiftheworld show, ‘I was born yesterday,’ but there is something about the way Taylor abstracts his foregrounds so that the main part of the image is pretty much all on the same plane – a seemingly spontaneous but very skilful handling of pattern and space - which somehow reminds me of Subotzky’s Sibidia Autostereogram.

And to sign off this monthly round up, a couple of pictures of South African artists taking part in the annual Paul Klee Zentrum Sommerakademie in Bern. One of last year’s fellows, Lerato Shadi, flew in from Berlin, and is seen here with London dancer Andrew Kerton.

And here, outside the historic Bern Kunsthalle is this year’s fellow Igshaan Adams, with Kaya Bekhalam and Federica Bueti.

Women’s Day in Cape Town

For non-South Africans, August 9, Women’s Day, is the anniversary of the 1956 march of 20 000 women on Pretoria to demand that women not be forced to carry passbooks.

This year, there was another march, on a different issue, marked by the high number of children taking part, whether they were carried, pushed in strollers, shoulder ridden or allowed to stride out decisively on their own.  About 50 000 people marched from District Six and swept up Adderley Street to Parliament to demand that Israel stop bombing Gaza and that the South African government should take action against Israel.  Inevitably, the presence of the children led to a sad reflection on the slain children of Gaza. 

The FREE PALESTINE march sweeps past The Slave Lodge

As I came out of the Slave Lodge, where I had been giving a walkabout of my show, ‘There’s something I must tell you’, the first marchers reached the corner, and an hour later, they were still swarming past. STOP BOMBING CHILDREN read one sign, and APARTHEID ISREAL. Artist Lynn Lomovsky went by carrying a sign reading BEING JEWISH DOESN’T MAKE ME A ZIONIST. Our national treasure Archbishop Tutu had given a speech at the beginning of the march, saying how important it was, in spite of everything, not to hate.

 One of Sumaya Hisham’s photographs of Archbishop Tutu 

Earlier in the week, Tutu was present at the opening of an exhibition of vivid photographs of him going about his daily life, taken by photo journalist Sumaya Hisham, photographs which exude his warmth, his wisdom and his charisma. 

Sumaya Hisham 

Sumaya says sometimes the Archbishop made her laugh so much she couldn’t take the photo she wanted, but the images that are there are a fine record of this remarkable man. The exhibition is set up in St George’s Cathedral, and it’s up for the whole of August.

Showing Mr Redford my etchings

And on a personal note, two weeks ago, the Slave Lodge called me to ask if I would be free on August 1 to give a tour of my show at the request of an important visitor… a visitor who turned out to be actor, environmental activist  and Sundance director Robert Redford and his party. A most unexpected honour.

There's Something I Must Tell You

Cape Town’s Iziko Slave Lodge

Until February this year, I had not set foot in the Iziko Slave Lodge at the top of Cape Town’s Adderley Street since it changed its name from the Cultural History Museum a few years ago. Then director Lalou Meltzer invited me to show my video installation work, There’s something I must tell you in the Slave Lodge in June.

The Slave Lodge is the second oldest colonial building in South Africa, and once housed the slaves the Dutch settlers brought in to work in the V.O.C, vegetable gardens. Van Riebeeck shot his first hippo in the swamp where Church Square, diagonally opposite the museum, now stands.

What I remembered best from an earlier visit to the museum years ago was a reconstruction of a Victorian chemist’s shop in one corner of an upper gallery. And some old china.

Well, the chemist’s shop is still there. But the Slave Lodge changed its curatorial policy as well as its name, so that today the contemporary sits alongside the historical artefacts and the videos telling of the importation of the slaves.

Siemon Allen’s ‘Labels’ at the Slave Lodge

Amongst the contemporary art exhibitions are Siemon Allen’s ‘Labels’: scans of thousands of record labels documenting the history of South African music hanging in curving curtains upstairs. And Keith Dietrich’s ‘Fragile Histories’, portraits of local people with immaculately folded text laden tracing paper rosettes can be found in another gallery. 

On the ground floor. my exhibition of work on women in the struggle over a period of thirty years, ‘There’s something I must tell you’, occupies five galleries.

‘There’s something I must tell you’  (installation view) 

The concept is for visitors to view the rooms of portraits of women, etched, photographed and videoed, and perhaps to reflect again on the histories of their own families. 

The room for writing.

In one room there are painted ‘pages’ on the walls, blank or lined, with the invitation, ‘remembering our grandmothers’.  Stairs and a hanging pen provide access. People started writing from the first moments of the opening. 

A Savannah sojourn

One of the criticisms of the movie 12 Years a Slave was that every time director/artist Steve McQueen wanted to make a transition, he would cut to yet another shot of swathes of Spanish moss, the soft grey plant which seems to hang from almost every old oak in the American south. Visiting Savannah, Georgia, for the first time last month, I could absolutely understand why McQueen couldn’t resist doing this. The soft, drifting veils are so distinctive, and add a haunted, Gothic touch to the landscape.

I was in Savannah at the invitation of the Savannah College of Art and Design to discuss an exhibition at the SCAD Art Museum next year, and I stayed in the historic SCAD guest house, Magnolia Hall, which comes complete with a southern porch and rocking chairs. 

Curator Simon Njami was in Savannah at the same time – his exhibition ‘The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Hell, Purgatory revisited by Contemporary African Artists’, currently at the MMK in Frankfurt, will move to the Art Museum later this year. In this pic, SCAD curator Aaron Garvey is on Simon’s left, and we are lunching at a funky retro restaurant called Back in the Day. 

The ruins of a 19^th century freight warehouse stand on the grounds of the stunning new museum, seen here in the background, with its iconic glass tower rising above the architectural award winning museum galleries. 

White armchairs light up at night, and the space inside the ruins is used for performances.

Inside the museum, one of the current exhibitions is Johannesburg artist Sam Nhlengethwa’s impressive and lively  ‘Life, Jazz and Lots of Other Things’, up until June 22. 

The exhibition draws on the influence of Romare Bearden’s collage style on the work of the artist, a style which Nhlengethwa took as a starting point for his own free experimentation. This detail of a work so heavy it took six men to carry it into the gallery translates the freedom of collage into an image rendered entirely in tiles.  

SCAD owns 72 buildings throughout Savannah, all converted to different uses for the college while retaining their own identity. Here, I am sitting in the foyer of an old cinema used for screenings and film events.

Laurie Ann Farrell is the executive director of exhibitions, overseeing not only the gallery programmess in Savannah, but also on the other SCAD campuses in Atlanta, Paris and Hong Kong.

Gallery hopping in New York

Cherry blossoms are busting out all over New York, and the best way to start gallery hopping in Chelsea is to have lunch at the Empire Diner on West 10^th Street at 23^rd.  This is my dear friend and ex boss from my New York advertising days, Joe Bacal. 

The food at the Empire is amazing, and I love the retro interior.

I’ve always wanted to make an art work which incorporated pressed steel, like these panels on the walls.

Brazilian artist Vik Muniz is showing at Sikkema Jenkins, collaging cut up and torn old family photographs to create the tones to build up a new image, then photographing this, and blowing it up to a large scale digital print.

‘Gang of Cosmos’ is Robert Longo’s show at Metro Pictures. It comprises twelve charcoal drawings by Longo of well-known Abstract Expressionist paintings. It’s quite disconcerting to see immediately recognizable paintings by such artists at Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock as what at first glance look like black and white photos of the originals. The gallery statement maintains that ‘it is the overlooked or imperceptible details of the complex surface, the tactility of the paint, the brushstrokes, and the pattern of the canvas that Longo has made visible.’ Hmmmm.

At Mary Boone, Ross Bleckner is currently on show. Bleckner’s painting are always seductive, with their softly airbrushed patterning and structure, though this particular painting perhaps leans too a little too close to the decorative for comfort. 

It’s a pleasure to catch up with Erwin Wurmm’s quirky work on ’Synthesa’ at Lehmann Maupin. This piece, which incorporates a white plastic paint bucket, is called ‘White Bucket’. The artist’s sly humour comes through in every piece, yet formal control is always maintained.

This Erwin Wurmm work is a painted bronze

Back from the galleries, I take a sunset pic of that iconic New York structure, the water tank.

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.